all in index

Google Bids $900 Million For Nortel Patent Portfolio

2011-04-04T18:22:00.000-07:00

Besieged by patent claims, Google is arming to defend itself, and perhaps to enter new markets.

Google cultivates the image of an unconventional company, but the vigor with which it continues to push the envelope of intellectual property law appears to be waning. Its copyright policy of seeking forgiveness rather than asking for permission, exemplified by its book scanning effort, was recently dealt a setback by a New York judge. And having lobbied for years without success for patent law changes, Google is now pursuing a conventional patent strategy: The search giant wants to buy Nortel's patent portfolio in a bankruptcy auction to strengthen its defense against patent infringement claims.

Google on Monday said that Nortel had selected its offer as the "stalking-horse bid," which represents the baseline offer for Nortel's patent assets. Nortel disclosed the amount of the bid: $900 million.

"The patent system should reward those who create the most useful innovations for society, not those who stake bogus claims or file dubious lawsuits," said Google SVP and general counsel Kent Walker in a blog post. "But as things stand today, one of a company's best defenses against this kind of litigation is (ironically) to have a formidable patent portfolio, as this helps maintain your freedom to develop new products and services."

If Google possessed such assets, it might have an easier time defending itself against Oracle, which believes Android infringes its Java patents, and might be able to better support its Android partners against the saber-rattling of competitors like Microsoft, which recently sued Barnes & Noble for alleged Android-related patent infringement.

Robert Kunstadt, managing partner of intellectual property law firm R. Kunstadt PC and an opponent of Google's book scanning project, sees Google's bid as a smart way to improve its defense against patent litigation. "If Google can purchase a portfolio covering areas where they haven't been active, it gives them the potential for counter-claims," he said in an interview.

Telephone and wireless technology, Kunstadt said, are areas with significant conflict. The stakes are particularly high, he suggested, because many claims seek to block infringing products from importation through the U.S. International Trade Commission.

As Walker observes in his post, Google is a relatively young company and has not built up a patent portfolio comparable to other tech industry leaders. Patent portfolios offer some degree of protection against patent infringement claims because they provide both a protected path for innovation and litigation deterrence in the form of a potential counter-suit.

IBM is the poster child for armoring itself with patents. In January, IBM said that it had received 5,896 U.S. patents in 2010, the most of any company for the 18th consecutive year. The enterprise computing giant also noted that its patent total was larger than the combined number of patents awarded to EMC, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, and Oracle.

Google does not even appear on IFI Patent Intelligence's 2010 list of the top 50 U.S. patent assignees.

As a point of comparison, Apple received 563 patents in 2010, a 94% jump from 2009. Apple's evidently heightened interest in patents highlights the intensity of the patent warfare presently raging in the mobile computing arena.

Nortel's portfolio consists of about 6,000 patents and patent applications covering wireless and wired communication technologies. Whether Google sees Nortel's patents as a way to enter new markets remains to be seen, but the telecom company's portfolio could prove useful with the development of software-defined networking (SDN), which Google is promoting through its participation in the Open Networking Foundation, or with the development of white spaces networking, among other projects. Google says that if its bid is successful, Nortel's patents will help it and the open source community with projects like Android and Chrome.

If Google wins the June 2011 auction and courts in the U.S. and Canada approve, the deal will rank as one of Google's biggest, behind only its purchases of DoubleClick and YouTube, and its 2005 search deal with AOL.

Firefox 5

2011-04-04T18:18:00.000-07:00

For the record, these are new features which Firefox 5 intends to build, but these are not new features at all and are already available in other browsers today. As I had posted earlier, Firefox 5 did want to add site specific features like Internet Explorer 9 has right now. All in all Mozilla is shunning innovation and does not have it’s mind in the right place and I frankly think that Firefox and Mozilla have seriously lost it.
Since Chrome came out in late 2008, each and every browser has just tried to mimic it, but most have failed miserably. This could be in my eyes only, but many browsers including Firefox have been doing nothing but mimicking the look and feel of Chrome and I have hardly found a compelling reason to switch from Chrome and go to another browser. I really don’t count the "new tab related features" Firefox 4 built in, because I know that several users including me don’t even care about it.
Chrome is fast, Firefox 4 is fast, IE9 is fast, Opera 11 is fast. However, the fact remains that all these years you (Mozilla) promised to provide users with a alternative to Internet Explorer, which was a pain in the posterior and sucked. But somehow Microsoft took away the momentum from Firefox with IE, if not Chrome, and introduced a new feature in Internet Explorer 9, which Mozilla will be now call "Social sharing" in Firefox 5?
Also Firefox is thinking about an inbuilt PDF viewer after Chrome already did it, and a new home tab that is similar to Google Chrome and Opera? Where is the innovation Mozilla that kept you apart?
What happened to you Mozilla? Weren’t you the leader in browser innovation? Why did you slack off? Why did you create Firefox 3.0 all through 3.6 which hung my PC more often than any other software ever did? Why does Firefox eat so much memory that I find my 6GB rig an ancient model from 1980s?
I am not the only one to pan the next beauty from Mozilla. You might want to check out the comments on Slashdot and it is really not looking good. I will just post few of the comments here and you shall get the general perception about Firefox:

Facebook? Twitter? Since when did Mozilla integrate commercial websites into their browser? Since integrating the Google search engine? Since AOL? This is why Netscape and Mozilla were originally kept separate. To keep the commercial bloat in the Netscape browser and allow the community to use Mozilla.

We need a security and functionality oriented fork ASAP. Performance matters also.
Nobody asked for changes to the interface. The interface to Firefox was never broken and nobody complained about it.

Nobody asked for the "awesome bar" or whatever the hell that is. If it improves productivity then fine, tabs make sense, but the majority of this shit is just gimmicks. Integrating the cloud makes sense but not when it’s specifically "facebook" and "twitter", but to allow anyone to select anything and make it completely transparent and open. They are going commercial in a really bad sell out kind of way, and you can tell the developers I said it.

Why not just take the Chromium tree and figure out how to run Firefox extensions on there and just call that Firefox? Would save time and have much better memory use and performance. Firefox is basically converging on a Chrome clone with slightly worse performance and some dumb UI hacks that will end up largely unused/abandoned (like Panorama). Isn’t all this what the extension ecosystem is for? Why would a team that already is overwhelmed by the task of testing its product incorporate MORE features to test? My main issue with Firefox right now is not a lack of Facebook integration (-_-) but the obvious memory leakage in the released FF 4 with AdBlock/NoScript, which was present through the entire last half of the beta cycle. Mozilla has really wandered off the reservation here. I want a solid, fast browser that supports the great extensions that Mozilla didn’t write, and continues to support developments in the core web standards space. If I want Chrome or Flock, I’ll just download those, seriously.

For more on such beauties visit Slashdot. I am really disappointed with you Mozilla/Firefox. This does not make it any better.

American Airlines Resume Doing Business Together Effective Immediately

2011-04-04T17:57:00.000-07:00

Earlier in January, we heard that American Airlines’ fares and links were removed completely from travel bookings site Expedia, after the two companies failed to come to a distribution agreement. Today, American Airlines and Expedia have made peace, announcing a new ” memorandum of understanding” that will allow the companies to resume doing business together effective immediately.

Financial terms of the agreement have not been disclosed, but clearly, the airline and travel site were able to come to a mutual agreement that suited their interests financially. American had a similar issue with travel search site Orbitz, and also removed its listings in late December 2010.

American itself has been trying to build up its own bookings site, and industry insiders thought that the airline was planning to adopt Southwest’s model of offering fares and booking solely through its site. As Airfare Watchdog reported earlier this year, the benefit of having consumers buy their flights on AA.com is that the airline makes money from the extra upgrades, including seat upgrades, insurance products, vacation packages, and hotel and car reservations.

While American didn’t expect a significant drop in sales from removing fares from Expedia, the fact that the two companies eventually reached an agreement makes me wonder if there was a financial impact for the airline after all. American also recently signed a distribution deal.

Yelp Increasing Their User From 50 Million A Month To 17 Reviews

2011-04-04T17:51:00.000-07:00

Over the last couple years, there’s been a huge surge in the suite of online services referred to collectively as ‘local’. There’s Facebook Places, which prompts users to check-in and claim deals. There’s Google Places, which recently launched its own check-in feature and also aggregates reviews from a variety of online service. And of course there’s Foursquare, which popularized the check-in model in the first place and recently launched a new Explore feature.

But despite all of this new competition, Yelp — which has been focused on local since 2004 — is still growing at a clip pace. Today the company has surpassed 50 million monthly unique users (as reported by their internal Google Analytics), up from 46 million the month before. And they have a total of 17 million reviews for venues around the world. CEO Jeremy Stoppelman says that the service is seeing a faster rate of growth for both contributions (reviews) and users than it has historically— in Q1, users wrote 2 million reviews, while most quarters average 1 million. In other words, even if some of these other services are gaining traction, it isn’t hurting Yelp.

To compliment its directory of user-submitted reviews (and to compete more directly with the aforementioned services), the company has launched its own local deals product and check-ins, though it’s still best known for its local reviews.

On a related note, here’s a video Yelp just shot about its most recent Hackathon. And if you haven’t seen it yet, make sure to check out our tour of Yelp’s office on TC Cribs.

$6.5 Billion In Cash For Texaz Instrument Acquires national Semiconductor

2011-04-04T17:45:00.000-07:00

Wow. Texas Instruments has signed an agreement to acquire fellow semiconductor manufacturer National Semiconductor for $6.5 billion, or $25 per share, in an all-cash deal. The boards of directors of both companies have unanimously approved the transaction, which is expected close in six to nine months.

Santa Clara-based National Semiconductor is a semiconductor manufacturer, specializing in analog devices and subsystems. The company’s products include power management circuits, display drivers, audio and operational amplifiers, communication interface products and data conversion solutions.

Texas Instrument’s Chairman and CEO Rich Templeton said in a release that the “acquisition is about strength and growth…National has an excellent development team, and its products combined with our own can offer customers an analog portfolio of unmatched depth and breadth.” He explains that the combination of TI’s sales team and National’s portfolio of analog products will help increase the joint company’s profitability and expand to additional markets.

Upon close of the transaction, National will become part of TI’s analog segment, and sales of analog semiconductors will represent almost 50 percent of TI’s revenue. TI will also continue to operate National’s manufacturing operations, located in Maine, Scotland and Malaysia.

All Will Be Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, Twitter

2011-04-04T17:29:00.000-07:00

You all might have seen this trend of copying product ideas in technology products. Folks at The Joy of Tech has created a nice funny cartoon which shows Google’s founder Larry Page and Sergey brin talking about the latest Android to be similar to Apple products and then the recently released +1 button to compete with “Like” button from facebook. Similarly Facebook founder Mark Z. thinking about getting into search and the legend Steve Jobs thinking about getting a pie of Social networking with Ping and at last Bill Gates who says “They’ve all ended up being Microsoft”

Portugal Liga Academica de Coimbra vs Portimonense

2011-04-04T06:10:00.001-07:00

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Galvanized Metal For Your Beverages

2011-04-02T09:48:00.000-07:00

Here is the Galvanized Metal make your holder more sophiscated, fore sure its for your life style.

Galvanized Metal 6-pack holder upgrading your life basic to something a little more fun and special. This Galvanized Metal 6-Pack Drink Caddy ($30) from the sophisticates over at Pottery Barn definitely qualifies as a bona fide upgrade. The silvery finish and riveted design have the nostalgia of milkman caddies, but you are welcome to use the carrier for beverages of a more fun variety. It’s also finished with a protective sealant to make it rust and corrosion resistant. More better than brings your beverages with cardboard, isn't it?.

Google will soon Nexus tablet?

2011-03-30T08:40:00.000-07:00

According to the rumors on several sites about technology, Google is working with LG to its tablet, Google Tablet Nexus.

Google has shown that does not like getting out of these struggles, and as they did with smartphones, is also preparing its Tablet.

According to various rumors, Google and LG are working together to create a Tablet you enjoy all the features of Google's operating system for tablets, Android 3.0 Honeycomb. Google launched its first smartphone, Google Nexus, which built by HTC and Google launched after S Nexus, in partnership with Samsung.

Now, this Nexus Tablet must have the same goal of other smartphones, which is to show and take full advantage of the Android operating system, and be prepared for the various updates that the operating system has.

The rumor is that this tablet will be ready in late summer or early autumn, and if you want a tablet with Android Honeycomb, which should certainly be better to wait a little longer for this.

Amazon launches services "cloud"

2011-03-30T08:26:00.000-07:00

Amazon announced today two new services, Amazon and Amazon Cloud Drive Player. Two services in cloud computing or cloud computing.
Already much has been said about the "cloud" and that this will be the future of the Internet, Amazon has launched aa is already on the market.
The new Amazon services are the Amazon and the Amazon Cloud Cloud Drive Player, and were pioneers in the offer. What Amazon is offering an opportunity for those who buy music on Amazon, or download songs to the Amazon Cloud Player, you can hear anywhere, on any mobile device such as Android, through the Amazon Cloud Player.
For example, you want a song on multiple devices ... What to do? Copies to your computer, then to mp3, then for the smartphone. With this new service, it takes much ... Just copy to your drive in the Amazon Cloud Drive, and the Amazon Cloud player, you can listen to any of its devices. Watch the video to launch the Amazon, where it explains it:
Now the most important question ... How much?
Cheaper than you think, in fact, Amazon offers 5 GB for free, no cost, and that could increase to 20 Gb if you buy any album on Amazon. It's not great? 5Gb is still considerable space.
Moreover, the songs you buy through these services do not count toward the storage space, and space for all your total usage, and their songs have and want to upload to the Amazon Cloud Drive.
This service is available on your computer, and through a device with the Android operating system, but is not available to the IOS, the operating system from Apple, which is normal.

Not yet. This service is still exclusive to the United States, but it is believed that soon will expand to the rest of the world.
Certainly a pioneering idea, and an excellent idea.

Skype completely removed from HTC ThunderBolt?

2011-03-17T08:23:00.001-07:00

When the HTC Thunderbolt was first announced, one of its main features was its ability to support Skype video calls. But as we got closer to the release of the device, Verizon mentioned that Skype wouldn't be ready in time for its launch. And now, with the phone officially announced to arrive tomorrow Skype is not only unavailable on the Android phone, but it looks like it might never be released for it at all. All the web pages and content online on HTC's and Verizon's sites have removed all mentions of the Skype feature – as if it was never meant to be on the phone in the first place. The folks over at Droid-Life did some investigation into the matter, and it's starting to look like one big cover up. There was no explanation to why Skype support has been removed – a falling out between Skype and Verizon, perhaps? But until further notice, don't expect to use the ThunderBolt's front facing cameras for video calls over Skype.

Automatic harmonica plays simple tunes

2011-03-16T08:00:00.003-07:00

An engineer by the name of Jon Sorkin has come up with one of the coolest ways to play a harmonica – by not playing it. He created a contraption that allows you to play songs on the harmonica with the push of a button. Just select a song, and press play. The machine was made by a handful of electronic parts, a couple of harmonicas and an air compressor. One of the harmonicas even has had its reeds reversed so the machine doesn't need to suck air to play a different set of notes – it only needs to blow air into the right holes to play a song. Admittedly it won't replace a human harmonica player (at least for now) but it does a decent job. The instructions have even been posted online if you're interested in building one for yourself. Hit the break to watch the machine in action:
More…

NVIDIA improves their 3D Vision glasses

2011-03-16T08:00:00.001-07:00

When the NVIDIA 3D GeForce system was first released, everybody was excited about being able to experience 3D gaming on their computers. But customer dissatisfaction soon arose when they found out the 3D glasses provided with the graphics card were plagued with battery issues. There have been reports of the glasses running out of power in the middle of a movie! Well, thankfully NVIDIA has addressed the issue and they've released an updated version of their GeForce 3D Vision glasses. The glasses now hold up to 60 hours of usage per single charge, and they cost $50 cheaper – putting the smile back on faces everywhere. NVIDIA's GeForce 3D Vision glasses are on sale now for $149.

Robot Headphone Splitter lets you share your favorite songs

2011-03-16T07:59:00.001-07:00

While we're still waiting for the Trembo Trunks to hit the market, an elegant way of sharing your music has arrived in the form of this super cute headphone splitter shaped like a robot. The Robot Headphone Splitter does exactly what its name says – it lets you split the audio from one connection into two outputs so you can easily share your music that's coming out from your mp3 player. All you need is another set of headphones for your friend to use. The Robot Headphone Splitter comes with a way to conveniently store it when not in use (its body) that has a keychain for you to keep it close whenever it's needed. When not in use, it makes an awesome keychain anyway – after all who doesn't like robots? The Robot Headphone Splitter costs $14 and is available here.

Webdoc: A Facebook On Steroids, Made in Switzerland

2011-03-16T07:58:00.001-07:00

Start-up Webdoc promises to offer more than the typical posting-and-answer ping-pong.

Thanks to the Twitterbooksquare revolution, there are now myriads of ways to let the world know who you are, where you are, and what you're doing at any given millisecond of the day – but it's still pretty tricky to have a real conversation on a social network, be it with your 500,000 closest Facebook friends or just a select few. Swiss start-up "Webdoc" aims to close the gap and give us true, two-way interaction with lots of multimedia extras and a minimum of effort.

Despite the name, which seems to signal work, Webdoc is actually fun to use. The company has come up with a technology that makes it easy to add photos, videos, maps, and even whole websites, to a posting, simply via drag-and-drop. If you're planning a movie night with friends, for example, you can include trailers in a Webdoc topic, show Yelp reviews, movie times, and maps. All of this will show up right inside the discussion stream, and every participant can contribute to the conversation in the same way, adding rich content rather than just dropping a comment. "People want to engage," says Webdoc co-founder Vincent Borel. "They are trying to communicate but it's very hard to follow a discussion on all those other platforms." More…

Microsoft loses $1.2M to Xbox Live exploiters

2011-03-16T07:52:00.001-07:00

A site that has been shutdown recently caused Microsoft a lot of headache and loss of Xbox Live revenue when it was running. The site was operated by some folks who somehow figured out the algorithm that could be used to generate Microsoft Points as well as codes for free 48-hour Xbox Live Gold membership trials and Halo: Reach avatar props. While the site has been shutdown, it wasn't before they caused Microsoft to lose $1.2 million. Microsoft hasn't announced what will be happening to the accounts that used the website or if they can even do anything about it at all. It looks like Microsoft might need to do some tightening up of their Xbox Live security.

Sony Ericsson release a new Xperia Play advert

2011-03-16T07:49:00.001-07:00

Awhile ago, Sony Ericsson released a creepy looking advert for the Xperia Play Android gaming phone – the one where the Android robot gets his thumbs. Well, if you've ever wondered where the robot's thumbs came from, the answer is here. Sony has just released the prequel to that commercial, showing us where the thumbs originate from. Aptly titled "The Donor", it continues with the edgy theme that was present in the previous commercial, so if you're a fan of the previous one you'll enjoy this one. If you weren't a fan of the grotesque looking thumb attached to the Android robot, you can give it a skip.

Black Friday Deals: The Only List You Need [Top]

2009-11-20T19:07:00.002-08:00

Black Friday is a week away, and thousands of markdowns are already announced. Our master list of Giz-friendly deals—a hefty read—includes similar items priced differently at different stores. Keep it refreshed, cuz we'll be updating it all week.

Bitch-Busting, Ammo-Counting Aliens Gun Is Real, Scary [Guns]

2009-11-20T19:07:00.001-08:00

At Milipol, I was walking around FN Herstal's booth, playing with futuristic-looking P90s, Five-Sevens and F2000s when I noticed a camera-toting tourist pretend-blasting with something very very cool: The Armatronics "Black Box" suite with Moving Red Dot Fire Control.

They'd taken a SCAR assault rifle, and put a "black box" inside the handgrip, networking it with the soldier ("with a kind of Bluetooth" according to the PR guy), and also to home base. The grip is a sealed, 10-year unit that logs the number of bullets fired and remaining ammo a la Aliens. They're also working on pairing to specific soldiers, perhaps using biometrics. Deactivating it if the Taliban get it, for instance? "In the near future," said PR man enigmatically.

The second part of the suite is the Moving Red Dot Fire Control Unit, which is a networked firing solution computer for the grenade launcher. You press a button next to the trigger to activate the laser rangefinder, then the computer calculates the solution, shows it to you in the LED display, then moves the red dot to aim it. That's right—laser-guided grenades. You are your own air support. [FN Herstal]

Apoorva Prasad is a freelance writer and photographer based in Paris, France, who covered the Milipol 2009 military-police expo for us. He has a thing for holo-scoped assault rifles, and sounds disappointed when admitting he's never been Tased.

Spectacular Meteor Lights Up the Utah Skies [Space]

2009-11-20T19:05:00.001-08:00

If you were hanging out outside in Utah on Wednesday night, chances are good that you witnessed a pretty rare astronomic event: a friggin' huge meteor that lit up the entire sky.

Clark Planetarium Director Seth Jarvis said the stony meteorite was probably traveling 80,000 miles an hour when it hit our atmosphere. He said it happened 100 miles up in the air; so despite the brightness, Utah was never in any danger. "These collisions can do damage, but they are extremely rare; and literally once in a century do you observe something that's actually doing damage," he said. Witness Andy Bailey said, "Oh, it lit up the whole sky, like almost brighter than the day. It was bright." Don White was in Wyoming and told KSL Newsradio for a moment he suspected a nuclear strike. "With something that brilliant and that fast, it was like, whoa, did we just get hit or something? It would have been some bigger noise I guess if a nuclear device had gone off," he said.

Cop Tasers and Arrests a 10-Year Old Girl For Throwing a Fit [Crime]

2009-11-20T19:04:00.001-08:00

Are idiot cops with tasers in some sort of competition with one another? I think the new record for stupidity belongs to Dustin Bradshaw, the Arkansas police officer who zapped and arrested a 10-year old girl for throwing a fit.

Get this: the mother called police because her child was throwing a fit about showering before going to bed. When the officer arrived the girl was kicking and screaming on the floor and the mother suggested that she should be tasered. Instead of saying something like "I don't have time for this crap lady" and calling out child protective services, the officer picked up the girl and carried her into the living room. At that point the girl was reported to be "kicking violently" and one of those kicks struck the officer square in the balls. The officer then proceeded to taser the girl in the back, handcuff her and drag her off to the Western Arkansas Youth Shelter.

If that wasn't bad enough, Officer Bradshaw was suspended for a week without pay, not because he tased the girl, but because he failed to use the camera attachment to record the incident. The girl, on the other hand, will face disorderly conduct charges as a juvenile over the incident. Seriously, what is it going to take before law enforcement decides to rein in police abuse of tasers? Or can cops just go around tasering babies and puppies at will?

November 2, 1936 - the beginning of television

2009-11-20T19:03:00.001-08:00

Although computers and the Internet have eaten away at the dominance of television, it remains the most popular form of entertainment and source of information in the world. And with the line between TV and computers blurring with the advent of Home Theater PCs (HTPCs) and devices like Apple TV it’s likely that television in one form or another will retain its crown for some time to come. Television is no longer limited to a big box sitting in the corner of the living room. It can be accessed on sexy, slim panels hung on a wall or on mobile phones while sitting on a train. In fact television is so pervasive today it can be hard to imagine life before it existed – but there was such a time, and it wasn’t even that long ago...

Harnessing waste heat to produce electricity

2009-11-20T19:02:00.001-08:00

That heat emanating from your computer as you sit reading this article amounts to nothing more than wasted energy. And your computer is not alone. More than half of the energy consumed worldwide is wasted, most of it in the form of excess heat. But new research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) indicates it might be possible to harvest much of the wasted heat produced by everything from computer processors to car engines and electric powerplants, and convert it into usable electricity. This kind of waste-energy harvesting might lead to mobile phones with double the talk time, laptop computers that can operate twice as long before needing to be plugged in to mains power, or energy plants that produce more electricity for a given amount of fuel...

Dubai has The Burj, but Berlin might get The Berg

2009-11-20T19:01:00.002-08:00

Hoax or hopeful? Sky high or pie-in-the-sky? German architect Jakob Tigges has unleashed a daring plan to create a man-made mountain in Berlin – not exactly a feature you instantly associate with the German city, but if this “project” gets approval that could change. According to The Berg website, Berliners are getting behind the project as another tourist-attracting (money-making) option for their fair city...

The ECOS Harbinger - an electric, Euro-styled supercar for under US$90,000

2009-11-20T19:01:00.001-08:00

Building electric cars will come with its own set of challenges - but then, in other ways things are going to get a whole lot easier. With plenty of battery technology available pretty much off-the-shelf, and electric motors being incredibly simple compared with their combustion counterparts, there's not a lot stopping small, independent operators from building fun electrics and getting them to market as soon as they're approved for sale. And such is the case with the ECOS Harbinger - which truly could foretell a bit of a small-business revolution in electric sportscars. US$89,995 will buy you a 120mph, 150-mile per charge, 6 second electric supercar with Lambo-style looks and scissor doors to boot. Nice!..

Modern Warfare 2 blasts all-time entertainment industry records

2009-11-20T18:59:00.001-08:00

The controversy caused by leaked scenes of a level of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 - where the player mows down innocent civilians at a Russian airport - were shown prior to launch has done nothing to slow sales of the much-anticipated game. Released worldwide on November 10, the game has set an all-time entertainment industry record, grossing an estimated US$550 million in its first five days of release...

Jabba The Hut Cake

2009-11-19T19:45:00.000-08:00

We’re not sure whose dream it is to have a Jabba the Hutt cake. A Princess Leia cake we can understand (and appreciate), but a cake of a slimy green alien? You’ll probably prove yourself to be one of the most fanatical Star Wars fans if you’re happy to wolf down this cake. You have to give it points for effort though, right?

Frictionator Ford F650 gets jet engine

2009-11-19T19:44:00.001-08:00

The street-legal Frictionator Ford F650 is no ordinary Ford as it comes equipped with a General Electric J85 Jet Engine, making it the fastest street legal jet truck in the world - or so it is self-proclaimed in that manner, as the afterburner does invalidates that claim somewhat. Don't think a seatbelt and airbags would make me feel safe in this zipping across the ground at top speed though.

XO2 Folding Scooter

2009-11-19T19:43:00.001-08:00

With electric vehicles become more and more common, the XO2 electric scooter shouldn’t surprise anyone based on it being powered by electric. One of the more interesting features of this electric scooter is that you can fold it up and bring it in to your apartment for charging. Granted it’s still pretty big when it’s folded, but if you’re going to keep it in your house to keep it away from the thieves, you’ll be grateful that it can shrink itself a little. The scooter sports between 60km/h for the XO2 50 Urban and 105km/h for the XO2 125 Urban. You’ll be able to charge the scooter to about 80% within a few hours, and get about 50-70km out of it. There isn’t any information on pricing or availability just yet, but stay tuned, and we’ll update you as soon as we get wind of those details.

Permalink: XO2 Folding

Presenter Type 2 animatronic robot

2009-11-19T19:42:00.001-08:00

The Presenter Type 2 animatronic robot doesn't go around as a regular robot, although it comes with movable arms that can wave around, while speaking its mind with LEDs that light up its face in a convincing manner. The Presenter Type 2 is meant to function as a form of animatronics in order to see action in promotions of items and products.

Robert Pattinson Drops By the Late Show

2009-11-19T05:04:00.001-08:00

Having just made his way out to the east coast, Robert Pattinson was back on the promotional run in New York City on Wednesday (November 18).

The Edward Cullen hunk dropped by the “Late Show with David Letterman” to boost hype for his new flick, “New Moon,” which hits theaters on Friday (November 20).

Meanwhile, Robert recently shared his best moment to come out of the popularity of the “Twilight” saga.

He tells, “Presenting at the Oscars and stuff, it’s just kind of so surreal. But there’s little things, like recently I’ve been working on the ‘Remember Me’ trailer and I had very little time to organize it, but the control you’re given because of ‘Twilight’s’ success is kind of incredible. It is an amazing feeling.”

Man Spoke Only Klingon to His Son for Three Years [Star Trek]

2009-11-19T04:47:00.001-08:00

d'Armond Speers isn't really a huge Star Trek fan. The reason he spoke only in Klingon during his son's first three years of life was to learn about the language acquisition process. Yeah, sure. What a petaQ.

Yes, I think That Speers is such a horrid person that I had to learn how to say so in Klingon from our intern Don. It just baffles me that Speers actually sounds genuinely proud of his personal pseudo-academic project:

I was interested in the question of whether my son, going through his first language acquisition process, would acquire it like any human language. He was definitely starting to learn it."

It's great that he wanted to see how languages are picked up, but did he not think that there's potential that he hindered his son's social development by keeping focus away from a real language? I'm all for teaching foreign languages early on, but lets make it ones that are spoken on this planet, please.

Hey Apple, Google, et al.: Why Do You Hate Christmas?

2009-11-19T04:46:00.000-08:00

As the TechCrunch Network’s resident mobile guy, I was given the task of writing up a list of apps for each smartphone platform that you ought to buy as little e-stocking stuffers for your loved ones. It was to be my primary contribution to CrunchGear’s ultra-amazing Holiday Gift Guide; my festively themed magnum opus.

But there’s a problem with this idea: it can’t be done. It’s not because I’m lazy (which may be true), nor because I don’t have any apps to recommend (which most certainly is not). I can’t recommend apps for you to buy for others, because you can’t buy apps for others.

Be it the Apple App Store, Android Market, Palm App Catalog, or BlackBerry App World, it’s bah-humbugs all around. The App Store is the only one that even gets close, allowing you to buy gift cards. Whilst many a geek would likely prefer the gift cards, there’s a big chunk of the world that equates giving a gift card to handing someone a piece of paper that reads “I didn’t really put much thought into this. Merry Christmas!”

Apple seems to be the one who could address this with the least effort, by making use of their redeemable promo code system. Currently reserved for dishing out promo copies of applications and claiming gift cards purchased online, it doesn’t seem like it would be insurmountably difficult to adapt for these purposes. Let people build “gift packs” of apps for friends (which would be much less difficult if Apple hadn’t done away with the Shopping Cart in iTunes 9), pay for them up front, and then generate a promo code which can be sent to the gift recipient. The recipient won’t know what they’re getting until the promo code is redeemed, making it about as close to opening a meatspace present as you get in the virtual world. Apple has a gifting setup in place for just about everything on iTunes besides apps.

BlackBerry and Palm aren’t too far behind – though they don’t have a code redemption system set up, they do offer up their entire app catalog online for perusal by anyone without a compatible handset. Android lacks both a redemption system and an off-handset catalog (outside of the few hundred apps they feature on the Market site). The closest bet you’ve got for any of these three would be PayPal’ing your buddy a few bucks with a list of Apps – but at that point, why bother?

It scares me to think about how much potential revenue is being thrown away here by ignoring would-be gift givers. In a time when many are cutting back their shopping lists to their family and closest of friends, the friendly pricing of apps makes them a perfectly opportune way to say “Hey, I still think you’re great”. No wrapping or shipping required.

LED Dress Lights Up Your Wardrobe and the Night

2009-11-19T04:44:00.001-08:00

One look at this dress and I was blown away by its beauty and innovation. The Galaxy Dress is a one of a kind of creation put together by two designers. Comprised of 24,000 LED lights, 4,000 Swarovski crystals and quite a lot of iPod batteries, this dress is being called "the largest wearable display in the world." While it's a breathtaking creation in still images, video is the only medium that really does this light-up gown any justice.

Designers Francesca Rosella and Ryan Genz, creators of a "fashionable technology company" called CuteCircuit, reached out to Wired.com to give some background story to the dress.

“We used the smallest full-color LEDs, flat like paper, and measuring only 2 by 2 mm,” say designers Francesca Rosella and Ryan Genz in an e-mail. “The circuits are extra-thin, flexible and hand-embroidered on a layer of silk in a way that gives it stretch so the LED fabric can move like normal fabric with lightness and fluidity.”

Jenny McCarthy and Ubisoft Team Up For New Fitness Game

2009-11-19T04:42:00.001-08:00

First Jillian Michaels, now Jenny McCarthy, it seems like everyone is trying to get in on the fitness gaming craze. Started by the highly successful Wii Fit, fitness games appeal to people that may not have the time to get to the gym or don't want to spend their hard-earned dollars on a gym membership.

Your Shape
, Ubisoft's addition to the fitness genre hopes to surpass Wii Fit's impressive sales numbers with more precise exercise movements, a little innovation, and a little help from funny woman Jenny McCarthy filling the spot of your in-game workout buddy. The Nintendo exclusive game features over 400 exercises including strength training, toning, and cardio. Unlike other fitness games, Your Shape is totally Wiimote free. So how does the game make sure your doing the exercise? Simple. Your Shape will be debuting the first ever camera for the Nintendo Wii.

The included camera will scans your body and detects your movements. After the initial scan, it projects your image onto the TV screen so you can watch your movements. As you exercise, the camera will be monitoring your motion to ensure you're not phoning it in and have the correct form. If you're slacking, or just not getting the movement down, Jenny will help you correct your form in real time.

Hurricane Ida Update

2009-11-10T06:40:00.001-08:00

Hurricane Ida continues to churn towards the Gulf Coast as a category two. All eyes have been on an approaching trough which will eventually turn the tropical cyclone eastward. Timing is everything with this system and the current thinking is that Ida will make a landfall along the Gulf Coast. Hurricane warnings are now up from Destin, FL eastward to Indian Pass. Hurricane wind warnings are also in place along the Alabama Gulf Coast. Tropical Storm wind warnings are in place for Choctaw and Wilcox counties southward. Weather conditions over West Central Alabama will go downhill quickly over the next 12 hours. Look for winds overnight averaging 15-25 mph. There may be wind gusts in excess of 30 mph as Ida passes to our southeast. Heavy rain will also be associated with this system overnight and tomorrow. Be sure to stay with WVUA for continuing coverage and will also continue to post frequent updates on the blog as Ida approaches. Stay tuned!

Marine Corps Birthday 2009

2009-11-10T06:39:00.001-08:00

Marine Corps Birthday 2009, General James T. Conway, 34th Commandant of the Marine Corps, invites you to celebrate the Marine Corps’ 234th Birthday at the Commandant’s Marine Corps Birthday Ball on Saturday, November 14, 2009, at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center. The Commandant’s Marine Corps Birthday Ball is the official ball of the Marine Corps, and is open to all hands. The celebration is a national-level event, attended by active duty and retired Marines and their families, as well as influential national, community, and civic leaders.

This year’s ball will continue the proud tradition of celebrating the birthday of the United States Marine Corps.

If you are looking for information about a birthday ball in your area, please contact a local unit.

Zip Your Lips For 3 Idiots

2009-11-07T19:40:00.003-08:00

It’s a first for Bollywood. At least 100 people from various age-groups have been shown the first half of Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s 3 Idiots as an exercise in gauging public reaction to his most ambitious venture to date. The chosen ones have been – lead actor Aamir Khan’s teenage son Junaid’s classmates, a group of middle-aged women, and some big trade names. But wait before you envy this lot of ‘privileged’ people… here’s the catch. Those who had seen 3 Idiots were given a Non Disclosure Agreement or an NDA to sign before they entered Vinod Chopra’s editing studio where the sneak previews were held. So what does this NDA say? It apparently is a proper legal document which prevents the people who have seen 3 Idiots from discussing it publicly or passing any opinion or judgment on it.

“If they do, then they are liable for legal action,” says a trade insider.
Anyway, the point is that this exercise was going great guns. Random people who were selected to watch 3 Idiots were actually thrilled. Many of them even partook in a film-discussion with the lead actor Aamir Khan after watching it, where Aamir encouraged them to speak their minds.

“Junaid’s friends were surprised that Aamir wanted a no-holds barred critical view,” says an insider.

And as said earlier, this exercise was paying dividends for the most part. Except when one leading exhibitor threw a fit and refused to sign the NDA. Other members of his family, who were present for the viewing exercise, signed the legal document thrust under their noses; but this gentleman categorically refused. He apparently even volunteered to walk out of the trial show, but said he would not sign the NDA simply because he felt the document was questioning his integrity.

Now it so happens that the practice of signing an NDA is commonplace in Hollywood Studios who hold ‘screenings for a discerning public across the board’ nearly six months before a movie makes it to the screens because they truly value the feedback.

However, as far as Bollywood goes, this is a first and hence, it is still considered offensive by a certain segment.

The official spokesperson from Vinod Chopra Productions confirmed the NDA story.

He said, “3 Idiots is an extremely guarded and prestigious project. So, yes, we got everyone to sign an NDA.”

Sec Championship Game 2009

2009-11-07T19:40:00.001-08:00

Sec Championship Game 2009: The waiting list has been closed for tickets to the 2009 SEC Championship Game. However, please read the information below regarding how the waiting list works. How does the waiting list work? Each year current SEC Championship Game ticket holders have the opportunity to renew tickets for the upcoming championship game. Tickets that are not renewed are sold through the SEC Championship Game Waiting List. The SEC Football Championship Game Waiting List is open each year from September 1 through December 31 (The 2010 Championship list will open September 1, 2009 and remain open until December 31, 2009).

Online entries are the only way to register for the SEC Football Championship Game waiting list. Only one entry per person, as multiple registries do not increase chances of being selected. All applicants who register between September 1 and December 31 are considered equal in date. If you are successful in obtaining tickets to the SEC Football Championship, you will have the opportunity to renew those tickets on a continual yearly basis. The SEC Ticket Office will notify you by mail by the end of August (of that particular year) if you have been selected to receive a form allowing you the chance of obtaining tickets. Those applicants who are not selected to enter the drawing for tickets will not be contacted or notified. Any applicant who is unsuccessful in obtaining tickets through the waiting list must resubmit their information to be considered for the following years SEC Football Championship (applicants are not carried over each year).

Zenyatta Racehorse

2009-11-07T19:39:00.001-08:00

Last I checked — both with the naked eye and from high above in Google Maps — there’s no fence around California. Zenyatta resides in the west, and I applaud her people for basically pronouncing “Come here if you want a piece of her.” When you are the champion, and make no mistake Zenyatta is the most dominant force in horse racing today (on the track, not in the court of 3-year-old hyperbole), you have earned the right to dictate your terms. Rachel Alexandra has not yet dethroned Zenyatta. Zenyatta staying home to play serves a myriad of objectives. One, it’s doing “what’s right by the horse.”

Argue what you want, but you can’t deflect the discussion that leading a horse over from the barn to the racetrack by a halter is safer and better for the horse’s well-being than boarding a plane, changing climates and allergies as well as medication rules, not to mention switching racing surfaces and saddling environments among other things.

Secondly, the California racing landscape has been the playground of Zenyatta’s owners Jerry and Ann Moss since they first started racing Thoroughbreds. Sure, Giacomo’s Kentucky Derby victory in Louisville made them national forces in 2005, but their loyalties should remain with the racetracks and fans that have given them their countless thrills and financial returns. In a struggling racing economy, California certainly among those circuits floundering, taking Zenyatta out of state to race would be a slap in the face of the very racetracks and fans who have supported the mare’s immaculate career. Meets like Hollywood, Del Mar and Oak Tree at Santa Anita need her star power, and the Mosses’ support of the SoCal scene should be applauded, not scoffed off as Zenyatta ducking any horse or challenge.

Finally, the Breeders’ Cup World Championships are in California this fall, and it makes absolutely no sense to jot her all over the racing map and take her out of her preparations for either the Ladies’ Classic or a date with the boys in the Classic. New York-based trainers don’t go searching for the Santa Anita Derby when they have a live prospect for the Triple Crown; they stay home and run in the Wood Memorial or head to Kentucky and get a head start by contesting the Blue Grass at Keeneland. Why should she ship? Zenyatta has nothing to prove to anyone. Those blow-hard horsemen and fans who talk in such terms are speaking of their own egos. When the hay rack is filled tonight, or the hot bran mash is stirred in the tub, you can be sure Zenyatta will not be wondering, “Geez, what’s Rach up to?”
And to that point, Zenyatta already has traveled out of state to compete on the dirt, doing so last year in the Grade 1 Apple Blossom at Oaklawn. She simply drilled defending champion mare Ginger Punch in that contest, winning one of those intersectional showdowns for which racing people clamor. It’s not Zenyatta’s fault it happened in April when the vast focus of the public was on Triple Crown hopefuls.
The Zenyatta “tour” also made a stop in Louisville this past Kentucky Derby week. She was entered and looked absolutely magnificent in the days leading up to the Louisville Breeders’ Cup Handicap on Oaks Day. But torrential rains forced the Mosses and trainer John Shirreffs to err on the side of caution and scratch. Having already made one cross-country journey this year to run, only to have the track condition render the trip moot, can you blame them for wanting to stick to an all-weather surface? And Mr. Moss of A&M Records fame ought to know better than anyone that it’s as true in lyric as it is on the Weather Channel: “It never rains in Southern California.” Meanwhile, it rains at about 5:30 p.m. sharp every summer day in Saratoga Springs.
Visually, I can tell you this after seeing both horses in early May: Rachel Alexandra would want nothing to do with Zenyatta anytime soon. Maybe by fall or when she’s fully developed physically, but for the immediate future Zenyatta truly towers over Rachel Alexandra in stature. Looks don’t win horse races, for sure, but when you combine the impeccable resumes of both with the obvious physical edge Zenyatta possesses to anyone looking at the two objectively, it becomes a checkmark in both categories for Zenyatta. And that’s not to slight Rachel Alexandra; we’re talking about one of the most immaculate racehorses any of us has ever seen in Zenyatta.
At the end of last year, I would argue that Zenyatta was a superior racehorse to Curlin on dirt or synthetic, though Curlin had a more encompassing year-long resume and fully deserved Horse of the Year. But head-to-head, on any surface, I would have put my hard-earned on Zenyatta over Curlin last November. That’s just my opinion, of course, but you’re welcome to differ when post time arrives for the next race. That’s the beauty of this game we play. Given her impressive comeback win in the Milady Handicap last week at Hollywood Park, Zenyatta looks every bit as strong as she was last year.

The anti-California bias among horse racing fans and pundits outdates me, and long will live past my potential grandchildren. Any animosity toward Zenyatta’s camp and talk that they are ducking anyone probably comes from the same people who still curse Pat Day’s rides on Easy Goer, failing to even recognize that Sunday Silence was a pretty good racehorse from out west.

We’d all love to see Rachel Alexandra and Zenyatta some day. But Zenyatta’s camp has earned the right to call their shots, no matter what dog-and-pony, attention-hounding show the Rachel Alexandra camp tries to strum up in the press this summer.

Zenyatta will be out west if anyone wants to look her up in the coming months. And, hey, I wouldn’t blame the Rachel Alexandra team for taking more money and facing straight 3-year-olds in races like the Alabama at Saratoga either.

Besides, aren’t we collectively better off to have both coasts enjoy these superstars until the championship showdown at the Breeders’ Cup, where there’s no excuse whatsoever for a healthy horse to be absent?

Jeremy Plonk has been an ESPN.com contributor since 2000 and is the managing partner of the handicapping website Horseplayerpro.com. You can e-mail Jeremy about this topic or anything racing-related at Jeremy@Horseplayerpro.com.

Jahvid Best, Jahvid Best Injury

2009-11-07T19:35:00.000-08:00

,Jahvid Best, Jahvid Best Injury Jahvid Best: CAL CAREER: A two-time first-team All-Pac-10 choice … has 30 career games played and 17 starts … ranks among Cal’s all-time leaders in 200-yard games rushing (3, No. 1), rushing touchdowns (28, No. 4), rushing yardage (2,639, No. 7), all-purpose running (4,020, No. 5) and scoring (204, No. 9) … has added career totals of 844 yards in kick returns on 32 tries (26.4 ypr) and 537 yards receiving and 6 TD on 61 catches (8.8 ypc) … has 50 plays of more than 20 yards (25 rush, 3 receiving, 22 kick return) …

has a total of 33 career touchdowns and 204 points, adding five receiving TDs to his 28 on the ground … Only Cal player in history with more than one 200-yard rushing contest (3) … 11 games of 100 or more rushing (No. 6 all-time at Cal) … posted seven consecutive games of 100 or more rushing yards that included the final four contests of 2008 and the first three games of 2009, totaling 1,228 rushing yards and 17 TDs on the ground on 126 carries (9.7 ypr, 175.4 ypg) during the span … has 33 career rushies of 20+ yards, to go along with 11 of 60+ yards and four of 80 or more … missed spring football in both 2008 and 2009 after a hip injury following the 2007 campaign and foot and elbow surgeries after the 2008 season.
Career Stats
2009:: One of the nation’s top candidates to win the 2009 Heisman Trophy, ranking as high as No. 5 (CBSSports.com, HeismanPundit.com) on current candidate lists … also was listed at No. 6 on the ESPN.com Experts Poll and No. 7 by SI.com … had reached the top spot on the CBSSports.com and SI.com, as well as No. 2 by ESPN.com and HeismanPunt.com after the third game of the season vs. Minnesota … on watch lists for the Doak Walker Award, Maxwell Award, College Football Performance Awards Overall Performer and Running Back of the Year, and the Walter Camp Award … the only player in the nation honored by the College Football Performance Awards in each of the first three weeks of the season, winning the CFPA’s Performer of the Week in Week 3 and the organization’s Running Back of the Week in both Weeks 1 and 3 … has rushed for 838 yards on 132 carries and scored 15 touchdowns (11 rushing, 4 receiving) in the team’s eight games, tied for first in the Pac-10 and tied for second nationally in scoring (11.2 ppg) … also fourth in the conference in rushing (104.8 ypg) and sixth in the league in all-purpose running (134.1 ypg) … entered the season as the nation’s leading returning rusher and was recognized as one of the preseason 2009 Heisman Trophy favorites by Athlon, Lindy’s (No. 4), Phil Steele (No. 6), NationalChamps.net (No. 9) and Sports Network, among others … selected as a first-team preseason All-American by Athlon and Lindy’s, as well as second-team choice by Phil Steele and Sporting News, and a third-team pick of NationalChamps.net … named by Sporting News as the nation’s top returning running back and the seventh-best player in the country … a first-team preseason All-Pac-10 choice of Athlon, Lindy’s, Phil Steele and Sporting News … Lindy’s also picked Best as the Pac-10’s 2009 preseason Most Valuable Player … added second-team preseason All-Pac-10 kick returner mention from Athlon and third-team according to Phil Steele … Lindy’s and Rivals.com list Best as its their top running back nationally, while he also checks in at No. 2 on Lindy’s list of Pac-10 NFL talents … Phil Steele has him as the No. 4 draft eligible running back and No. 25 kick returner in the country … Sporting News tabbed him No. 7 in the preseason on its list of the nation’s top players.

Individual Game-By-Game: vs. Maryland: 10 rushes, 137 yards, 2 TDs (73 long); 2 receptions, 23 yards; 1 kick return, 18 yards • vs. EWU: 17 rushes, 144 yards, TD; 2 receptions, 19 yards, TD • at Minnesota: 26 rushes, 131 yards, 5 TD; 3 receptions, 17 yards • at Oregon: 16 rushes, 55 yards; 2 receptions, 14 yards • vs. USC: 14 rushes for 47 yards, 2 receptions for 5 yards • at UCLA: 18 rushes, 102 yards, 1 TD; 2 receptions, 51 yards.• vs. WSU: 13 rushes, 159 yards, 2 TD; 1 reception, 29 yards, TD. • at ASU: 18 rushes, 63 yards,; career-high 7 receptions, 61 yards, TD

2008: A first-team All-Pac-10 choice for the second straight year (special teams in 2007), as well as a second-team All-American by College Football News … also shared the Bear Backers Award given to the Team MVP with seniors Zack Follett and Alex Mack, while taking home the team’s Most Valuable Back honor … led the Pac-10 and ranked third in the country in rushing, averaging 131.67 yards per game and finishing with a total of 1,580 rushing yards that was the second-highest ever at Cal, behind only J.J. Arrington’s 2,018 yards in 2004 … his 8.1 yards per carry was the best of any player in the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) with at least 125 rushes in 2008, as well as a school record … led the Pac-10 and ranked second in the nation with 187.3 all-purpose yards per game behind Missouri’s Jeremy Maclin, who was selected in the first round of the 2009 NFL Draft … also led the Pac-10 in kick return average (26.3, No. 21 NCAA), and tied for the league lead in scoring with an average of 8.0 points per game (No. 35-T NCAA) and scoring touchdowns with the same per game average on 16 TDs for a total of 96 points … became the first non-quarterback to pace Cal in total offense (No. 8 Pac-10) since Gary Fowler co-led the team in 1969 and the first running back to lead by himself since John Olszewski in 1952 … voted Offensive MVP of the Emerald Bowl after galloping for a bowl-record 186 yards and two touchdowns on 20 carries vs. Miami, Fla. (9.3 ypc) … his 15 rushing TDs tied the Cal single-season mark also held by J.J. Arrington (2004) and Justin Forsett (2007) … a three-time Pac-10 Offensive Player of the Week (Sept. 6, Nov. 22, Dec. 6) … capped off the regular season with a school-record 311 yards on 19 carries vs. Washington – the fourth-highest total in Pac-10 history and the most in the Pac-10 as well as the fourth most in the nation in 2008 … his 311 all-purpose yards against Washington were also the most in the Pac-10 in 2008 … also had four rushing TDs vs. the Huskies, including scoring sprints of 60 and 84 yards, to tie the Cal modern era record and equal the most in the Pac-10 in 2008 with his 24 points scored, four touchdowns and four rushing TDs also matching a Pac-10 season-best … had the two longest runs in the Pac-10; in addition to the 84-yard rush vs. Washington, went 86 yards at Washington State … the only Cal player ever and the only Pac-10 player in 2008 to have three 200-yard games in a season (311 vs. Washington, 201 vs. Stanford, 200 at Washington State) with those ranking as three of the top four 2008 rushing performances in the Pac-10 … had eight 100-yard rushing games to tie for first in the Pac-10 … ran for a combined 698 yards on 58 carries (12.0 yards per rush) in Cal’s last three games vs. Stanford, Washington and Miami, Fla. … had 19 rushes of 20 or more yards and seven of 60+ yards, including three runs of 80 or more yards … recipient of the Berkeley Breakfast Club Award for the Most Outstanding Offensive Player in the Big Game … tied for second on the team with 27 receptions for 246 yards and a touchdown … opened the campaign with 111 yards rushing on 24 carries and one touchdown, 63 receiving yards and 103 kick return yards for 277 all-purpose yards against Michigan State … became the first Cal player since J.J. Arrington in 2004 to open a season with back-to-back 100-yard rushing games after racking up 200 yards on the ground at Washington State in the second game of the season … dislocated his left elbow vs. Colorado State in the fourth game of the year … after missing the Arizona State contest, returned at Arizona and rushed for 107 yards and a touchdown … went for 115 yards and a touchdown against UCLA and 116 yards with a score vs. Oregon State … had two tackles.

2007: Burst onto the scene as a true freshman, seeing action at tailback, as a return man and a gunner on kick coverage … a first-team All-Pac-10 selection as a special teams player … named the team’s Most Valuable Freshman and also received the J. Scott Duncan Award (Most Valuable Special Teams Player) … missed the final three games of the season (Washington, Stanford and Air Force) due to a hip injury … tallied 20 or more yards on 28.0% of his touches (16-of-57 plays) … burst through tacklers for a season-best 64-yard touchdown run at Colorado State for his first career touchdown … added his first career receiving touchdown against Louisiana Tech the following game with a 16-yard grab … had four carries for 46 yards in his college debut against Tennessee … returned 15 kickoffs for an average of 27.0 yards per effort (second in the Pac-10), including a career-long-tying 54-yarder at UCLA and added 12 others of 20 yards or more … also a standout special teams gunner with 12 tackles and a fumble recovery.

HIGH SCHOOL: A SuperPrep and Parade Magazine All-America choice … rated as the No. 18 running back in the country by Scout.com … selected to the All-Far West team by SuperPrep … Rivals.com also tabbed him with a No. 9 ranking at his position and as the No. 11 prospect overall in California … selected first-team “Best in the West” by the Long Beach Press-Telegram … PrepStar national Top-100 prospect … the consensus Bay Area Offensive Player of the Year … garnered CalHiSports.com first-team All-State honors … for his career, rushed for 6,428 yards and scored 91 touchdowns … rushed for 3,325 yards and found the end zone 48 times as a senior, both setting Bay Area single-season prep records … over 25 percent of his touchdowns were 50 yards or longer as a senior … ran for 1,444 yards to go along with 271 yards in receptions and 20 total touchdowns for the 12-1 BCAL and Class A CIF North Coast Section champion Chieftains in 2005 as a junior … had 12 carries for more than 50 yards as a senior and 10 more as a junior, when he averaged 10.4 yards per carry … also ran track and field, winning a gold medal in the 200 meters at the 2005 USTAF Junior Olympics … won the 2007 California State Championship in the 100 meter dash with a time of 10.31 and also finished second in the 200 at 20.65.

PERSONAL: Full name is Jahvid Andre Best … born January 30, 1989 … parents are David and Lisa Best … major is undeclared but considering Legal Studies.

Putney Swope

2009-11-07T07:27:00.001-08:00

TCM is showing “Putney Swope” Friday night on their Underground segment. It’s on at 2:00 AM Eastern on Saturday morning (that’s late Friday night). Last I knew the DVD was discontinued, but while looking it up on TCM I discovered it’s still available at Movies Unlimited. So this isn’t a huge Set Your Recorders emergency, but it’s still something I think a lot of you will be interested in. Another Robert Downey Sr. movie is being shown the same night:

“Greasers Palace” from 1972. So that’s neat. Also, I’d like to mention that SBBN just reached 100,000 hits since it first opened a little over 2 years ago. Thank you all!

Slender Man

2009-11-07T07:26:00.001-08:00

The Slender Man was created at the Something Awful Forums in a thread entitled “Create Paranormal Images.” He is described as wearing a black suit strikingly similar to the visage of the notorious Men In Black, and as the name suggests, appears very thin and able to stretch his limbs and torso to inhuman lengths in order to induce fear and ensnare his prey. Once his arms are outstretched, his victims are put into something of a hypnotized state, where they are utterly helpless to stop themselves from walking into them.

He is also able to create tendrils from his fingers and back that he uses to walk on in a similar fashion to Doc Ock, the Spider-Man villain in the Marvel Universe. The superhuman stretching ability could also be seen as a similiarty between himself and Mr. Fantastic of the Fantastic Four. Whether he absorbs, kills, or mearly takes his victims to an undiclosed location or dimension is also unknown as there are never any bodys or evidence left behind in his wake to deduce a definite conclusion.
Not much is known, as no specific information is given within the thread about origins, but his objective and habitat are made very clear. He has the need to kidnap children, and is seen right before the disappearance of a child or multiple children. He seems to prefer fog enshrouded streets and wooded areas as a way to conceal himself from being noticed. It should also be noted that children have been able to see him when no other adults in the vicinity could. Children also have dreams or nightmares concerning The Slender Man before their disappearance. Confiding these stories to their parents are met with the usual parental admonition: overactive imaginations.
Even though The Slender Man is a total fabrication, people have already claimed sightings. He appears to the unwitting mostly at night, and most always peering out of wooded areas or near rivers. He has also been reported to peek inside left open windows and to walk out in front of lone motorists on long uninhabited roads. The Slender Man or men, have appeared everywhere from Japan, Norway, and America to name a growing few.
“we didn’t want to go, we didn’t want to kill them, but its persistent silence and outstretched arms horrified and comforted us at the same time…”
1983, photographer unknown, presumed dead.
One of two recovered photographs from the Stirling City Library blaze. Notable for being taken the day which fourteen children vanished and for what is referred to as “The Slender Man”. Deformities cited as film defects by officials. Fire at library occurred one week later. Actual photograph confiscated as evidence.
1986, photographer: Mary Thomas, missing since June 13th, 1986.

Fort Hood Victims List

2009-11-07T07:21:00.001-08:00

As a former Army medical evacuation pilot and Vietnam veteran, John Van Buskirk doesn’t shock easily. But of yesterday’s violence at Ft. Hood, the Dallas man says, “You never think something like this is going to happen in America, particularly on a military installation.” Van Buskirk is not only shocked. He’s also worried about the soldiers and the 40 staff members who were at the post’s medical processing center. It’s a place John Van Buskirk says he was the Commander of for two years, until he retired in August.

John Van Buskirk says, “I told my wife early this morning I don’t know how somebody could go in and fire a semi-automatic pistol and another pistol in a crowded building like that and not hit some of the staff. I just don’t see how that’s possible.”

Van Buskirk gave us pictures of the center he says were taken about a year ago. They show how packed it can get. He says on a busy day there could be 100 soldiers in the 5,000 square foot building that has few places to hide. They could be targets from the start. John Van Buskirk says, “When you first walk in the door, there’s about 40 chairs there, people sitting, waiting to see the health care providers.”

John Van Buskirk is trying to stay calm tonight through the torturous waiting game. He’s relying on his 20 years of military practice for that, as well as a bit of humor and a touch of denial. He says, “I actually think I try to push it away so I just don’t dwell on it.” But he says, that is easier said than done.

Scott Becker Looking For April

2009-11-07T07:20:00.001-08:00

Scott Becker Looking For April:Got another quick presentation for ya. I discovered Sammy yesterday. I gave a quick talk about it today. That’s how easy it is to understand! Sammy is a tiny, client-side JavaScript framework, created by the obviously brilliant Aaron Quint, built on jQuery, and inspired by the server-side Ruby framework Sinatra. It’s the minimalist’s framework for RIAs. You know, those uber rich internet applications. Single page, no refresh apps. Like Gmail. Except without all those kilobytes you may or may not ever need. Sammy is 7kb, minified. And gzipped? You won’t even know you downloaded it.

Droid Phone Reviews

2009-11-07T07:18:00.000-08:00

We’re getting this out of the way now: Motorola’s Droid is the best Google phone on the market. Maybe that’s not saying a whole lot. The Droid’s only competitors in the U.S. are T-Mobile’s 1-year-old G1, its chubby younger brother the MyTouch 3G and HTC’s Droid Eris, a $99 Verizon Wireless phone that comes out Friday — the same day as the Motorola Droid — with an already-outdated Android operating system. Here’s another one: Droid is the best phone on Verizon. As we wrote last week, the Droid marks a notable shift for the nation’s largest carrier. Verizon -- often renowned for its service, not its selection of phones — seems to be wisely minimizing its interference with handset makers.

What we get is an attractive and fast smart phone packed to the brim with features for $199 (with a two-year contract).

The Droid hardware is a technical feat. It has a 5-megapixel camera with a flash that doesn’t perform exceptionally well but still pretty great for a phone. The speaker is pleasantly loud. The touch-screen screen is gorgeous — larger than the iPhone’s with way more pixels per inch.

Oh, and it has a keyboard.

After spending plenty of time with the iPhone and MyTouch, we realized just how much we don’t miss physical keyboards. Granted, the Droid’s isn’t as nice as most Blackberry keyboards. We spewed just as many typos on the Droid’s black-and-white-and-brown keyboard as we did on software keyboards. Only problem is that we’re not offered automatic corrections like we get on the touch-screen keyboard.

Impressively, the slide-out keyboard doesn’t add much thickness compared with the iPhone — the Droid is only slightly bigger and noticeably heavier. The keyboard is a nice option (geeks will enjoy the pro shortcuts), but if you’re not digging it, you never have to pull it out.

Motorola takes a step back with its navigation buttons. Competing Android phones use a scroll ball — you know, that little nub that makes the Blackberry so good for e-mail. Instead, the Droid opts for a four-way rocker navigation with a center button, which sits next to the keyboard and provides little utility.

Under the hood, the Droid runs a version of Android 2.0, becoming the first device that has it. That means it packs features and polish you won’t see on the other guys — most notably the free Google Maps Navigation software.

Android has really come a long way in a year. The software keyboard is smarter, the included apps more sophisticated and the subtleties of switching between programs more natural.

But for as far as Google’s operating system has come, it remains several steps behind Apple’s iPhone in many respects. Even though we ripped on Apple for leaving out the copy-and-paste feature for so long, there’s something to be said about how it was finally implemented. It’s simple and works incredibly well.

On the flip side, selecting text on the Droid drives us nuts. The option is hidden behind a menu screen; there’s no clever magnifying glass to help you grab the right section; and to copy, you have to again find the option somewhere in the menus.

This design choice underlines a prevalent problem that still plagues Android. Some fairly common actions are hidden, including the basic ability to delete apps.

(Here’s a tip so you don’t look like a stooge at the Verizon store: Press the lock icon and turn to the right to open the phone. The majority of people who played with our review unit couldn’t figure out how to get into the phone.)

Button layouts can vary widely from app to app. Transitioning between the many programs that can run simultaneously works well enough, but some can’t be closed while others gobble up battery power with no warning.

Android’s Marketplace offers more than 10,000 apps — that’s certainly not on par with Apple’s library of 100,000, but Android’s selection covers most of the main utilities.

As a game system, it’s severely lacking. As a media player, it’s even worse.

The iPhone can sufficiently replace a standalone iPod. The Droid won’t. Getting songs onto the thing is a hassle. No media sync, no smart playlists, no TV shows or movies.

Sure, we love some of the features Motorola built exclusively for this handset — things that could never be done on the iPhone without Apple engineers building it themselves. For example, the Droid phone book integrates with your Facebook contacts.

But these little perks don’t make up for the intuitiveness and maturity of the iPhone’s operating system that Android has yet to match.

Yet, as a phone, the Droid is top-notch. It integrates seamlessly with Google Voice and runs on Verizon, a telecom with a superior reputation for reliable call coverage — unlike AT&T, the exclusive carrier of the iPhone.

For at least the next couple of months, Droid will wear the crowns of best Android device and best Verizon phone.

But Google is constantly making improvements behind the scenes to its mobile system, so who knows how long that will last? With more phone makers on the Google bandwagon, next year could very well mark the Droid renaissance.

Only 3 Percent of Americans Think It Should Be Legal to Text and Drive

2009-11-02T07:22:00.001-08:00

I didn't think 97 percent of Americans were in agreement about anything, but apparently they are about texting while driving: They think it should be illegal. A mere 3 percent don't care, or didn't answer cause they were busy texting.

And half think it should have the same penalty as drunk driving. Steeeep.

What's fascinating is that while 80 percent think phones should be a no-no, they deem it kosher if you're going hands-free. Newsflash, morons, a bunch of studies show it's just as distracting if you're using a Bluetooth headset. It's the conversation that's distracting, not your hands being up near your head. Personally, I think we should also ban eating, drinking, using combs or makeup, overly talkative passengers, any kind of music, talk radio, GPS navigators, and small children from being in cars, period. Only then can we drive completely safely, since then we won't ever be distracted by anything ever again.

Liveblogging Couple's Pirate Captors May Have Been Apprehended

2009-10-29T08:09:00.001-07:00

Seven Somali pirates who may have played a role in the kidnapping of liveblogging couple, Paul and Rachel Chandler, are currently in the custody of the European Union. Their involvement is still unproven and the Chandler's remain missing.

The captured pirates' link to the Chandlers is based on a message from "pirate spokesman" Farah Abdi who made claims that his team held the couple captive in the first place, so some skepticism is required. I just hope my favorite sailing livebloggers are safe.

Digital camera inventor Steve Sasson collects honorary PhD, Economist award

2009-10-29T08:05:00.001-07:00

If there's one thing we know about geeks, it's that they hate having nothing to do. Bill Gates has filled his spare time collecting knighthoods and Harvard degrees, and Steve Sasson -- inventor of the first, and assuredly biggest, digital camera -- is now following in his distinguished footsteps. Sasson perfected a microwave oven-sized 0.01 megapixel prototype while working for Kodak way back in 1975, and has now been awarded an honorary PhD for his troubles from the University of Rochester. The man, the geek, and the legend (all the same person) will be in London later today receiving further recognition, in the form of The Economist's Innovation Award, which commends the "seismic disruption" his invention caused in the field of consumer photography. Funny, nobody gives us any awards for being disruptive.

Nintendo profits sink on declining console sales, weak game selection

2009-10-29T08:04:00.001-07:00

Oh how the mighty have fallen. Nintendo just announced that its interim net profit was cut by more than half to ¥69.49 billion (about $770 million), from ¥144.83 billion last year at this time -- figures that won't be helped by the cheaper Wii price tag announced at the end of September. Speaking of which, Nintendo sold only 5.75 million Wii consoles from April to September (down 43% from last year) and cut its full year sales forecast for the April 09 to March 2010 period to 20 million units, down from an expected 26 million. DS sales were also off 15% from last year and we doubt that a bigger screen on the new DSi LL model will change that dramatically.

AlterG's M300 treadmill: same 'anti-gravity' vibe, now 'only' $24,500

2009-10-29T08:03:00.001-07:00

We've always heard that holiday calories "don't count," but disregarding urban legend for a minute, we'd say AlterG's timing here is nothing short of impeccable. Nearly 1.5 years after the outfit's P200 series was a-okay'd by the FCC, an all new walking machine has entered the fray. The M300 treadmill brings along the same "anti-gravity" feel (useful for rehabilitation and athletic training), but in a machine that's a third of the price and way, way sleeker. The idea here is to reduce the strain on joints and muscles as one exercises, and while that's certainly commendable, we're still thinking it'll take one or two more iterations to get one priced for the everyman. You know, unless you consider $24,500+ (or $499+ per month for the rest of your Earthly life) "affordable."

Google says it's now blocking 'fewer than 100' numbers in Google Voice

2009-10-29T08:02:00.001-07:00

The crux of AT&T's recent complaint to the FCC regarding Google Voice was that Google -- not being subject to the common carrier rules that help facilitate fair, open telephone networks -- was blocking customers from accessing numbers managed by rural carriers that charged higher connection fees, thereby giving it a leg up on its Old Guard competition by saving cash in ways AT&T and others are legally barred from doing. Google's hitting back today, not by agreeing to submit to common carrier rules (come on now, don't be ridiculous) but by saying in a statement to the FCC that it's now blocking calls to "fewer than 100" numbers in total now that it has finished implementing new back-end capabilities that allow it to single out specific numbers rather than entire exchanges. Google complains that calls to the top ten exchanges accounted for 26 percent of its entire connection fee outlay -- but yeah, that's pretty much what telcos have been dealing with since time immemorial, so the bellyaching's likely to fall on a lot of deaf ears. For what it's worth, the company is still asking the FCC to make sweeping changes to connection fee policy, but whether this ends up getting them out of AT&T's more immediate concerns remains to be seen.

An Acoustic Hyperlens

2009-10-26T21:09:00.002-07:00

This is the acoustic hyperlens developed by the Xiang Zhang research group. Think of it as a radar dish for sound waves. Put into practice, it can increase performance of ultrasound baby spotting and sonar submarine sighting by 8x.

I Pity the Fool Who Doesn't Want to See the New A-Team

2009-10-26T21:09:00.001-07:00

(Gizmodo's bullpen a few minutes ago). Me: The new A-Team. Liam Neeson will be Hannibal. Brian: What the fuck. Backlink to the team limo. Me: That's not for posting.

Brian: Oh, I think it's postable late at night.
Me: Hahaha, you think that's for posting, you fool.
Brian: They always had gadgets, home made.
Me: That's a streeeeeeeetch. But I'm not going to say no.
Brian: I pity the fool who thinks that's not a post.
Sean: Jessica Biel is in that shit too.
Brian: Yeah, just go with it. It'll feel great.
Me: They better make it good.
Brian: They won't. They will ruin our memories. If T drinks poisoned milk, it will be all good.
Me: Our memories of cheesy TV, yes. We can only hope Mr. T gets a cameo.
Wilson: Yeah, they're second only to MacGyver in postable cheesy 80s TV shows.
Adam: How can anyone play Mr. T? I don't understand.
Me: Me neither.
Adam: Seems like an impossible challenge.
Me: That requires serious acting.
Brian: Yeah, BA Baracus wasn't even a character. He was Mr. T.
Me: I don't think DeNiro would be able to pull that off, much less this dude.

That, dear readers of Gizmodo, is how we spend our afternoons. While we drink cocktails. On the beach. Mixed and served by ninja cyborgs.

A-Team, the movie based on Stephen J. Cannell's famed TV series, is being directed by Joe Carnahan. Liam Neeson will be Hannibal (great choice, although George Peppard will be hard to beat), Sharlto Copley as Murdock, Quinton Rampage Jackson as B.A. Baracus, and Bradley Cooper as Face. Let's hope this remake is as good as the new

Soft Tofu Chair Molds to Your Softer Tofu Tush

2009-10-26T21:08:00.001-07:00

I've never been all that enthusiastic about eating tofu. But sitting on a gigantic piece of the stuff sounds just delicious.

No, Yu-Ying Wu's "breathing chair" is not really a giant chunk of tasteless protein, but it will automatically form to your body as you sit, turning from tofu to armchair with the weight of your body. But beyond intriguing design, the chair is built from a springy plastic compound with enough resistance that it will actually help lift you out of the chair when standing, relieving some pressure from your knees.

Wu's chair is still just in the design stage, which is a shame, because my butt is hungry.

Lost Northwest 188 Pilots Were Probably Dicking Around on Their Laptops

2009-10-26T21:07:00.001-07:00

Last week, Northwest Flight 188 blew past its destination by over 100 miles and didn't respond to air traffic control for 75 minutes, prompting panic. Most guessed the pilots fell asleep. Now, it appears they were messing around on laptops.

It's come out of interviews with the NTSB that the still-suspended pilots now claim the mishap happened while they were on their laptops, talking about their work schedules. It wasn't until a flight attendant called up the pilots 5 minutes before their scheduled landing time to ask about about an ETA that they realized how far off-course they were. While the WSJ says pulling out a laptop is not unheard of, it's against Delta's company policy, according to their latest statement about the incident. That must've been some conversation—the only thing I can think of on a computer that would prompt a conversation that long would be boobs or baby-back rib recipes. And only one of those is worth making a flight over an hour late.

This Week's Shooting Challenge: Jack-o'-Lanterns

2009-10-26T21:05:00.002-07:00

It's almost Halloween, and for this week's Shooting Challenge, we want to see see pumpkins. And we want them to be evil.

The official challenge: "Jack-o'-Lanterns." As always, interpret the theme however you'd like to give us the best shot that you can.

And for a little inspiration, check out the photos of "fall leaves" we received last week.

The Four Rules:

1. Submissions need to be your own.
2. Photos need to be taken the week of the contest. (No portfolio linking or it spoils the "challenge" part.)
3. Explain, briefly, the equipment, settings and technique used to snag the shot.
4. Email submissions to contests@gizmodo.com.

Send your best entries by the end of Thursday at contests@gizmodo.com with "Jack-o'-Lanterns" in the subject line. Save your files as JPGs or GIFs at 800 pixels wide, and use a FirstnameLastname.jpg naming convention using whatever name you want to be credited with. Include your shooting summary (camera, lens, ISO, etc) in the body of the email.

Thanks, I'm looking forward to everyone here showing me up (again) by the end of the week!

Tarzan's Making His Reservations At This Frame Hotel

2009-10-26T21:05:00.001-07:00

Finding a room service guy who doesn't even blink if you're running around in a loin cloth (or less) shouldn't be tough in this Dubai hotel. The place already almost looks like a jungle on the inside.

With the walls constructed of dark, solar protected glass, the abundant plant life of this Villamoda Galleries design is clearly visible at the right angles and the neatly kept vertical gardens appear as if they're part of the hotel's very structure and are a stunning blend of nature and architecture. I just wish there were some vines to swing around from.

Trick Yourself Into Saving Money With the Spend/Save Coin Bank

2009-10-26T21:04:00.001-07:00

This is clever: a coin bank that will randomly place your change into one of two compartments, spend or save. That way, you'll have only the bank to blame when you don't have enough money for rent.

Internet Finally Getting Non-Latin Domain Names

2009-10-26T21:02:00.000-07:00

The ICANN, the folks who set some guidelines that make the Internet go 'round, are in the final stages of passing a proposal to introduce non-Latin characters to web addresses. Finally, there'll be some non-porn-based multiculturalism on the Internet.

Seriously, this is incredibly huge. Aside from being one of the single biggest changes to domain names since the "creation" of the Internet, more than 40 years ago, it also finally takes into consideration that more than half the Internet's users' native languages contain non-Latin characters. In a sense, it truly represents the liberty of the Internet.

It's taken many years to get here, but if plans are approved as expected, on October 30, then applications for these new domains can start flying in as soon as November 16. I'm definitely crossing my fingers and hoping that there aren't any let downs, because, as Brian remarked (tongue-firmly-in-cheek, I'm sure), this proposal shows that the white man doesn't own the Internet anymore.

Newly Discovered Hole On Moon Leads To Network Of Tubes

2009-10-25T19:36:00.001-07:00

Images have revealed a hole on the Moon's surface that is at least 260 feet deep and may lead to an underground tunnel more than 1,200 feet wide which is part of an entire network of such winding tubes.

Scientists are hoping for clearer shots from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, but the impression so far is that such a tunnel network could provide shelter for astronauts or potential future Moon colonists. I just plain wonder if they could combine it with the recent discovery of water for one kickass underground waterpark.

DIY Laser Hair Removal And DIY Botox Markets Expanding

2009-10-25T19:35:00.002-07:00

I love DIY projects, lasers, and chemistry sets as much as the next gal, but the whole do-it-yourself laser hair removal and Botox market boom is terrifying. Untrained individuals shouldn't be pointing needles and lasers at themselves.

The American Society of Plastic Surgeons is in an uproar about the things people are doing in their bathrooms. It's not that those surgeons are just worried about losing money on procedures, they're bound to gain clients from all the DIY messups anyway, but they appear genuinely concerned about regulations and safety. And I agree, because somehow former Gizmodo intern Benny Goldman letting the Jezebel team cajole him into a bikini wax doesn't seem so insane when you read about people ordering Botox from websites called Discount MedSpa and putting videos of their DIY injections onto YouTube (Warning: the clip may make you cringe).

We all like to look pretty, but there are safer ways to get rid of hair, folks! And somehow it's better to have wrinkles than order Botox from a website that looks like it was made in Microsoft Word.

Dell’s New Solar Parking Lot

2009-10-25T19:35:00.001-07:00

Think about how hot your car gets on a sunny day. Dell decided to harvest all that wasted energy by installing these solar panels in their parking lot. Now they're keeping cars cool and putting that sunlight to good use.

The structure generates 130 kilowatts of solar power, enough to offset 145,000 lbs of greenhouse gas emissions annually. There are even charging terminals available for electric cars, but only two can be charged at a time. Seems like a pretty smart way to keep drivers comfortable and harvest some spare energy on the side.

The Biggest Lego Mario Ever Built

2009-10-25T19:34:00.001-07:00

If you have $3700 handy, you can buy this 6-foot tall, 110-pound, 40,000-brick Lego Mario, the biggest ever built. It took one week to plan, and 175 hours over 16 days to build.

gawkerGallery(5389281,8,'Lego Mario');

You don't have to feel like a dorky geek for buying it, because the money will go to charity. So you can feel like a good-hearted dorky geek.

The auction lasts till November 1st, and the money will go to the Ronald McDonald foundation in Netherlands, "a dutch organization that arranges proper housing for relatives of hospitalized children, in the vicinity of clinics."

This Week's Gaming Stories You Cannot Miss

2009-10-25T19:32:00.000-07:00

Whoa whoa whoa. Wait a second. Since when does Batman dress up in a cookies and cream batsuit? Unless he's chasing the Joker through a Nabisco factory, this ensemble simply cannot work.

PC Arkham Asylum Players Play Dress-Up
Batman in a Green Lantern suit just isn't right.

Let's Take An Audio Walk Through Akihabara
It's so easy to get lost looking for a specific shop in Tokyo.

Can You Top This Dragon Ball Halloween Costume?
That last-minute costume you've been looking for.

Lost Planet 2 Preview: Let's Hope This Works

Marvel Super Hero Squad Review: This One Is For The Brats

Borderlands' Creative Boss Lives Up to His Loot Promises
Borderlands!!!!

Best Buy Doing The Buy 2, Get 1 Free Thing Too
Starts Sunday.

Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack In Time Review: The Leap, At Last

Take Dragon Ball: Raging Blast For A Spin
Best name for a DBZ game yet!

The Gears of War Snuggie
You cannot escape the Snuggie.

Barnes and Noble Nook press conference in NYC (report)

2009-10-23T08:22:00.001-07:00

Barnes and Noble Nook press conference

On Tuesday, October 20th, Barnes and Noble held an anticipated press conference at Chelsea Piers in New York City. Held at Pier 60, the event overlooked the Hudson river with a backdrop of million dollar yachts.

Barnes and Noble had a fairly full house, with about 250 - 300 people in attendance. The audience included all of Barnes and Noble's management team, plus business partners and designers.

The opening address was by Steve Riggio, CEO of Barnes and Noble. He welcomed everyone, and talked a bit about Barnes and Noble's history as a bookseller and innovator, who he felt had revolutionized book-selling. Riggio stated B&N was the first discount bookseller in the 1970's. They rescued a floundering chain in the 19890s to become a national book retailing presence, and pioneered and perfected the book superstore. They desired to have a store that was not intimating, with great selection and great service, and feels they succeeded.

They were also the first online bookseller, the first to offer free shipping, and the first to offer a dedicated ebook reader - the old Rocket ebook device. Riggio felt their current initiatives were natuaral extensions of what they have been trying to do, which is graw and expand the book market. According to Riggio, books overall, including trade books and texty books, are a $30 billion dollar industry - larger than music, games. videos, or movies.

He believes the industry must go digital, and customers want ebooks. Barnes and Noble's motto is "Any book, anywhere, any time."

He then introduced William J. Lynch, the new President of BarnesandNoble.com, their online presence. William praised Steve, and talked about the industry support for the initiatives, as the audience included the CEOs of Random House, Harper Collins, Simon and Schuster, Macmillan and Perseus Books, among others.

He recounted their purchase of Fictionwise, the fact that they had the world's largest ebook store, and that the eReader application had broad device support and the eReader for the iPhone had one million downloads. He stated Barnes and Noble will be the ebook store for the new Plastic Logic device which is forthcoming, and Plastic Logic CEO Richard Archuleta was in attendance. (Plastic Logic is not the manufacturer of the Barnes and Noble device.)

William said the big question they had to answer was "Should Barnes and Noble make a dedicated reader?". He felt they had a tradition of leadership and innovation, and didn't want to produce a "me too" product. When they decided to do it, they aimed for technological sophistication in an attractive and easy to use package. He announced the new Barnes and Noble "Nook" reader.

A lot of what they chose to offer has already been leaked. The Nook features an innovative dual screen display, with a 6" eInk upper panel with 16 shade gray scale, and a color lower menu panel using capacitive touch screen technology similar to the iPhone. The Nook will support 5 fonts, have 2GB of internal memory, sufficient to hold up to 1,700 ebooks, and have a micro SD slot for a potential 16GB of additional storage per SD card. The Nook is USB based, and can connect to a PC or Mac for file transfer. According to the presentation, the Nook doesn't have buttons. Everything is handled via the touch screen.

Under the hood, the Nook is using the Google Android OS. Android is Linux based, and Barnes and Noble's designers claimed to like it because it was optimized for display on smaller mobile devices. (I'm sure the fact that it was free and open source, with no licensing required by Google didn't hurt.) I'd been following Android since Google released it, and have the SDK. I was wondering when we would see devices based on it that weren't smartphones, and the Nook is a good example of what sort of things are possible.

Lynch acknowledged that Android as a platform offers a base for development, but declined comment on future development, or whether an SDK would be released to allow third party developers to create Nook applications and utilities. My guess is this will happen at some point if the Nook takes off and demand is there, but I don't expect to see it soon.

As of now, the Nook supports three formats. It will handle the legacy "eReader" format originally developed by Peanut Press for Palm OS devices, and subsequently ported to a range of other devices. B&N has also partnered with Adobe and licensed Adobe's Mobile SDK, so the Nook will support ePub, PDF, and Adobe DRM. Barnes and Noble's intent is to transition entirely to ePub in the future.

The Nook has connectivity options, featuring both free connectivity to Barnes and Noble's online store via AT&Ts 3G wireless network, and Wifi which can be used to connect within Barnes and Noble stores. The Nook offers a couple of features we haven't seen previously. One is an attempt to replicate the experience of browsing in a store. Just as you can pick a paper book off the shelf, go the the cafe, drink coffee, and potentially browse the entire book, the Nook will let you do that with ebooks, using streaming technology. If you decide you like the book and wish to buy it, you can download it on the spot to your Nook.

Another popular function with paper books is loaning them to friends. The Nook permits that with ebooks, allowing you to load a purchased title to a friend who also has a Nook for a 14 day period. Like with a paper book, when it is loaned out, your friend has the book and you don't. It is not available to you while on loan. Not all books will be loanable. Whether or not a book can be lent is determined by B&N's agreement with the publisher. Books which can be lent will be identified in B&N's online catalog.

Barnes and Noble is also apparently keeping customers bookmarks and annotations on the web. The presentation claimed you will be able to do things like read a book on your nook, and be able to pick up where you left off on you iPhone using their reader application. This implies connectivity and opens a level of privacy concerns, but details were not discussed at the presentation.

Barnes and Noble considers the bookstore to be the critical demand generation center. They intend to make the nook available for sale through 700 Barnes and Noble outlets and 600 college bookstores in late November, at a retail price of $259. This counters the rumor that Barnes and Noble would offer the device through Best Buy. With a network of 700 Barnes and Noble stores, plus 600 college bookstores, there's no need for additional retail partners. If they can't sell it themselves, it probably can't be sold.

Nook will have personalization options, including the ability to load user supplied photos, with on board software to handle the conversion, and a range of designer cases will be available.

The first 10,000 nooks pre-ordered at Barnes and Noble will ship with a free copy of Malcolm Gladwell's _The Tipping Point_.

When asked whether Nook would go global, it was stated that that was being looked at, but no announcement would be made now.

Another question was on pricing. The Barnes and Noble reps stated they were comfortable with the $259 price for the reader, and didn't see that being adjusted for competitive reasons. They did announce their intention to be "competitive" on ebook pricing. Whether this means matching Amazon's $9.99 standard price for many books was not explicitly stated.

They announced that they were working with publishers and exploring "bundling" options, where you could buy the paper and electronic versions of a book at the same time, though details of how this would work were not offered.

They were asked about plans to support Windows Mobile and they stated that was planned. Since eReader is currently available in versions for the PocketPC 2002 and earlier, and Windows Mobile smartphones of 2003, it's unclear what support is being mentioned. They were also asked about an eReader app for Android, and while no specific announcement was made, they commented that the Nook was based on Android, so a reader app for other Android devices was a logical next step.

In response to queries about future devices akin to things like the Kindle DX, they stated they were looking at a variety of form factors, and geve the impression that the Nook was simple the first in what could become a line of readers optimized for different purposes.

They stated they have a mailing list of 20 million, and announcements would be made periodically of special events, free ebooks and the like. They also said they are workign with publishers for things like "author exclusive" offers available only fir the Nook.

A question about publication support got a response that Barnes and Noble didn't plan to use an RSS feed, but instead intended to convert publications purchased for viewing on the Nook to ePub. They also stated the Nook would not have a web browser, as they did not feel eInk supported a decent browsing experience.

It was a well received presentation with a couple of innovative features announced. Further information will be available at http://www.nook.com, and at http://www.barnesandnoble.com/twitter/.

Will this effort bear fruit? Can Barnes and Noble successfully compete across the board with online retailers like amazon, and brick and mortar stores like Walmart and Target? We won't know for a while, but Barnes and Noble seems to feel they have no alternative but to try. The development of BarnesandNoble.com, the purchase of Fictionwise, the partnerships with people like Plastic Logic and the release of a dedicated reader under their own brand are evidence of a determination to compete. We'll see whether they can.

I'm just wondering how long before people make remarks about the Barnes and Noble "nookie"... :p

The interactive 3D Virtual Autopsy Table

2009-10-23T08:21:00.001-07:00

Swedish researchers have developed an interactive touchscreen 3D autopsy table that allows pathologists to examine virtual representations of real bodies in minute detail and from numerous viewing angles. Using data provided by scans of an actual body, the table allows the user to remove layers such as skin and muscle, add or remove tissue and circulatory systems, zoom in and out and cut through sections with a virtual knife. The video below is a "must watch"...

Video: Suzuki fuel cell vehicles at the Tokyo Motor Show

2009-10-23T08:19:00.001-07:00

Suzuki’s carbon free mobility effort at the Tokyo Motor Show used three existing models to demonstrate the benefits of its growing hydrogen fuel cell expertise: the SX4 fuel cell car, a two-wheeler based on the existing Burgman 125 feet-forward enclosed scooter, and the fuel cell powered Mio Electric Wheelchair. Although Suzuki also showed a plug-in hybrid version of the Swift, another existing car being adapted to a future power train, the company is clearly staking a claim in the Fuel Cell technology arena. Check out the video to see what Suzuki has planned for our garages in the coming years...

Unused TV channels bring broadband to rural U.S.

2009-10-23T08:18:00.003-07:00

Discarded and left-for-dead, old TV broadcast channels (called “white spaces”) that have been freed up by the transition to digital TV in the U.S. are being given new life and used to wirelessly deliver high-speed Internet connectivity to business, education and community users. Under an experimental license granted by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Spectrum Bridge designed and deployed a wireless TV white spaces network to distribute broadband Internet connectivity in Claudville, Virginia. To ensure the local residents make the most of this new high-speed connectivity, Dell, Microsoft and the TDF Foundation have contributed software and hardware to the local school and the town’s new computer center...

Yamaha's EC-f electric motorcycle has two wheels and one plug

2009-10-23T08:18:00.001-07:00

Motorcycles are light, small, and easily able to ride up on sidewalks in search of hidden power plugs. They're the perfect electric vehicle but, despite a few notable exceptions, they're still powered by dino juice. Yamaha, makers of the raucous crossplane crank R1 sportbike, has decided to go a little bit cuter for its vision of the rechargeable future, the EC-f. It features an aluminum frame, a lithium ion battery, and styling cues that will have riders worrying about that green ring turning red. That, of course, assumes this will ever actually have riders, which is doubtful given the fate of most fanciful Tokyo Motor Show concepts like this.

Windows 7 Whopper claims its first victim

2009-10-23T08:17:00.001-07:00

Few brave souls will even attempt to consume the Windows 7 Whopper, and fewer still will achieve that first dyspepsic bite -- as you can plainly see in this video. Indeed, we were sure that this was some sort of promotional stunt for Microsoft in Japan, but now reports are filtering in that these have been available in Texas for years now. Of course, in the Lone Star State it's not called the Windows 7 Whopper, it's called "lunch."

FCC net neutrality rules enter drafting process, face McCain challenge

2009-10-23T08:15:00.002-07:00

Our old friends at the FCC have started to put words into action, as the net neutrality regulations proposed by Chairman Julius Genachowski have now entered the rule-drafting stage. The provision of most import here is that broadband providers would be forbidden from traffic discrimination or "management," and compelled to provide equal access and services to their users, irrespective of the type or bandwidth uptake of their internet activity. Of course, this is hardly a bumpless road, with Senator John McCain proposing the Internet Freedom Act of 2009, whose sole reason for existing will be to prevent the FCC from putting those rules through. Even if things do go smoothly, though, "reasonable network management" will still be an available recourse for telecoms, where it is necessary to block spam and illegal content, such as child pornography. Which sounds kinda like censorship to us. Look, we have no more interest in child porn than we do a pair of Lady Gaga Heartbeats, but any time we hear of internet providers having either the right or responsibility to block content, we get an uneasy feeling in the pit of our libertarian stomachs. Anyhow, the great big gears of regulation have finally started turning, and we can look forward to more political wrangling as the rules take shape over the coming months.

In Japan, nerds control girls with joysticks

2009-10-23T08:15:00.001-07:00

For some of you, like this guy (look at his face!), this is a dream come true, no questions asked. The rest will be wondering what the hell is going on here. See, that bicycle helmet affixed with what looks like a robotic crab is a not so subtle, ear tugging navigational device that could ultimately benefit the sight-impaired or anyone, really -- it pulls on the left ear to direct the wearer to the left, on the right to go right. Simple. Granted, it looks ridiculous now, but imagine it miniaturized under a tin-foil helmet and communicating with a hands- and eyes-free GPS navigational system. You've just seen the future, how does it feel?

'Unique' Bluetooth banana has truly limited applications

2009-10-23T08:14:00.001-07:00

Some products require no explanation. Take this "Unique Banana Shaped
Bluetooth Handset," for example -- either you get it or you don't, but
no amount of marketing, advertising, or sweet-talking is going to get a
skeptic to appreciate its brilliance. If you're still reading this,
maybe -- just maybe -- you fall into the "I need this, particularly at
just $17.70" camp, and for you, take heart in the knowledge that you can
be just 2 to 5 business days away from talking on a simulated piece of
fruit that's connected to your phone via Class 2 Bluetooth 2.0. When's
the last time you heard "standby time" quoted for a banana, anyway?

Honda's U3-X taken for an awkward squat

2009-10-23T08:13:00.000-07:00

The granola girls over at Autoblog Green had the rare opportunity to test out the quirky little U3-X on a visit to the Honda R&D center in Japan. You remember: the self-balancing unicycle that fits in a car door and relies on an inclinometer (not gyroscope) to know which way is up. In essence it balances the rider like a broomstick held on-end in the palm of the end. Autoblog calls it "far more intriguing than a Segway" due largely to the Honda Omni Traction (HOT) drive system that allows the personal transporter to move forward, back, and left and right on a series of small wheels. Unfortunately, Honda wouldn't let anyone peek underneath to see the magic. When turned on the U3-X stands upright making small motions to maintain balance. And as awkward as it looks, riding the U3-X "couldn't be easier" -- like a Segway you just lean ever so subtly in the direction you want to go. It will tip over if the rider leans too far or too fast but it's apparently very simple and intuitive to keep upright. The 20-pound model tested was designed for indoor use only and booked along at an overdue-toilet-break pace of 4MPH. Check it out in the video after the break.

Marvel's Comic Book Creator Is $&@#ing Brilliant

2009-10-21T23:43:00.002-07:00

Marvel's Create Your Own Comic service is designed for kids, but that shouldn't stop you.

The free online app allows you to select between a slew of page layouts, then drag and drop your favorite (mini) Marvel heroes into each panel. Of course can also add text, sound effects objects—whatever you need to flesh out that 4-part series you've always wanted to see in which a prepubescent Wolverine struggles to uncover the roots of his inexplicably persistent five o'clock shadow.

But the best part is that the whole system is vector based, meaning that you can enlarge any element (like characters) as much as you'd like before exporting your comic to a fairly high rez PDF (that's free from watermarks or any other stuff that could sour the experience).

Though, I must admit, I fear to see what your minds come up with in the comments. Please keep in mind that none of these superheroes are of age.

Algernon Lives! (Scientists Develop World's Smartest Rat)

2009-10-21T23:43:00.001-07:00

Hobbie-J is a genetically engineered rat that can navigate mazes faster and recognize toys better than his peers. We just hope the little guy fares better than Charlie and Algernon.

Scientists in Georgia and China developed Hobbie-J's superior brain by modifying the NR2B gene, which in turn increased NMBA receptor sites on the brain's individual neurons (which are sort of like pores). Bigger pores equals every so slightly increased transfer duration of neuron-to-neuron messages, allowing Hobbie-J learn things more efficiently. But Hobbie-J also has a better memory as well, remembering novel toys up to 3 times longer than peers.

Apparently the super rat processed complex situations better, but Hobbie-J wasn't capable of any sort of higher level cognition associated with larger-brained mammals. Or we just weren't smart enough to notice

A Lifeguard Tower I Would Live In

2009-10-21T23:41:00.000-07:00

If I wore a red swimsuit to work every day, used to drive a black Pontiac Firebird Trans Am, and all my female friends had big boobs and ran in slow motion, I would totally live in this lifeguard tower.

gawkerGallery(5387010,5,'Lifeguard Towers Gallery');

Or in any of the above, for that matter. But seriously, I'd live in the first one—created in 1975 by German engineer Ulrich Müther and architect Dietrich Otto—even if I weren't a lifeguard. It is located in Binz beach, on the island of Rügen. Now, please enjoy these gratuitous shots of "lifeguards":

If I Could Skate, I'd Love The Bouwkunde School Building

2009-10-21T02:06:00.001-07:00

Actually, I can't skate worth a damn and I'm still daydreaming about grabbing a board and attempting to abuse this building as a huge skating ramp. Granted the photovoltaic panels might trip me up a bit.

Designed by Adam Wojtalik, the Bouwkunde is meant to replace a burned down building on the Delft University of Technology campus. With the usual auditorium, offices, and coffee bar wrapped up in a curvy design like that with a hidden lawn area to boot, I don't see why it shouldn't be approved.

Barnes and Noble Nook press conference in NYC (report)

2009-10-21T01:39:00.000-07:00

Barnes and Noble Nook press conference

On Tuesday, October 20th, Barnes and Noble held an anticipated press conference at Chelsea Piers in New York City. Held at Pier 60, the event overlooked the Hudson river with a backdrop of million dollar yachts.

Barnes and Noble had a fairly full house, with about 250 - 300 people in attendance. The audience included all of Barnes and Noble's management team, plus business partners and designers.

The opening address was by Steve Riggio, CEO of Barnes and Noble. He welcomed everyone, and talked a bit about Barnes and Noble's history as a bookseller and innovator, who he felt had revolutionized book-selling. Riggio stated B&N was the first discount bookseller in the 1970's. they rescued a floundering chain in the 19890s to become a national book retailing presence, and pioneered and perfected the book superstore. They desired to have a store that was not intimating, with great selection and great service, and feels they succeeded.

They were also the first online bookseller, the first to offer free shipping, and the first to offer a dedicated ebook reader - the old Rocket ebook device. Riggio felt their current initiatives were natuaral extensions of what they have been trying to do, which is graw and expand the book market. According to Riggio, books overall, including trade books and texty books, are a $30 billion dollar industry - larger than music, games. videos, or movies.

He believes the industry must go digital, and customers want ebooks. Barnes and Noble's motto is "Any book, anywhere, any time."

He then introduced William J. Lynch, the new President of [u][url=http://www.barnesandnoble.com]BarnesandNoble.com, their online presence. William praised Steve, and talked about the industry support for the initiatives, as the audience included the CEOs of Random House, Harper Collins, Simon and Schuster, Macmillan and Perseus Books, among others.

He recounted their purchase of Fictionwise, the fact that they had the world's largest ebook store, and that the eReader application had broad device support and the eReader for the iPhone had one million downloads. He stated Barnes and Noble will be the ebook store for the new Plastic Logic device which is forthcoming, and Plastic Logic CEO Richard Archuleta was in attendance. (Plastic Logic is not the manufacturer of the Barnes and Noble device.)

William said the big question they had to answer was "Should Barnes and Noble make a dedicated reader?". He felt they had a tradition of leadership and innovation, and didn't want to produce a "me too" product. When they decided to do it, they aimed for technological sophistication in an attractive and easy to use package. He announced the new Barnes and Noble "Nook" reader.

A lot of what they chose to offer has already been leaked. The Nook features an innovative dual screen display, with a 6" eInk upper panel with 16 shade gray scale, and a color lower menu panel using capacitive touch screen technology similar to the iPhone. The Nook will support 5 fonts, have 2GB of internal memory, sufficient to hold up top 1,00 ebooks, and have a micro SD slot for a potential 16GB of additional storage per SD card. The Nook is USB based, and can connect to a PC or Mac for file transfer. According to the presentation, the Nook doesn't have buttons. Everything is handled via the touch screen.

Under the hood, the Nook is using the Google Android OS. Android is Linux based, and Barnes and Noble's designers claimed to like it because it was optimized for display on smaller mobile devices. (I'm sure the fact that it was free and open source, with no licensing required by Google didn't hurt.) I'd been following Android since Google released it, and have the SDK. I was wondering when we would see devices based on it that weren't smartphones, and the Nook is a good example of what sort of things are possible.

Lynch acknowledged that Android as a platform offers a base for development, but declined comment on future development, or whether an SDK would be released to allow third party developers to create Nook applications and utilities. My guess is this will happen at some point if the Nook takes off and demand is there, but I don't expect to see it soon.

As of now, the Nook supports three formats. It will handle the legacy "eReader" format originally developed by Peanut Press fpr Palm OS devices, and subsequently ported to a range of other devices. B&N has also partned with Adobe and licensed Adobe's Mobile SDK, so the Nook will support ePub, PDF, and Adobe DRM. Barnes and Noble's intent is to transition entirely to ePub in the future.

The Nook has connectivity options, featuring both free connectivity to Barnes and Noble's online store via AT&Ts 3G wireless network, and Wifi which can be used to connect within Barnes and Noble stores. The Nook offers a couple of features we haven't seen previously. One is an attempt to replicate the experience of browsing in a store. Just as you can pick a paper book off the shelf, go the the cafe, drink coffee, and potentially browse the entire book, the Nook will let you do that with ebooks, using streaming technology. If you decide you like the book and wish to buy it, you can download it on the spot to your Nook.

Another popular function with paper books is loaning them to friends. The Nook permits that with ebooks, allowing you to load a purchased title to a friend who also has a Nook for a 14 day period. Like with a paper book, when it is loaned out, your friend has the book and you don't. It is not available to you while on loan. Not all books will be loanable. Whether or not a book can be lent is determined by B&N's agreement with the publisher. Books which can be lent will be identified in B&N's online catalog.

Barnes and Noble is also apparently keeping customers bookmarks and annotations on the web. The presentation claimed you will be able to do things like read a book on your nook, and be able to pick up where you left off on you iPhone using their reader application. This implies connectivity and opens a level of privacy concerns, but details were not discussed at the presentation.

Barnes and Noble considers the bookstore to be the critical demand generation center. They intend to make the nook available for sale through 700 Barnes and Noble outlets and 600 college bookstores in lagte November, at a retail price of $259. This counters the rumor that Barnes and Noble would offer the device through Best Buy. With a network of 700 Barnes and Noble stores, plus 600 college bookstores, there's no need for additional retail partners. If they can't sell it themselves, it probably can't be sold.

Nook will have personalization options, including the ability to load user supplied photos, with on board software to handle the conversion, and a range of designer cases will be available.

The first 10,000 nooks pre-ordered at Barnes and Noble will ship with a free copy of Malcolm Gladwell's _The Tipping Point_,

When asked whether Nook would go global, it was stated that that was being looked at, but no announcement would be made now.

Another question was on pricing. The Barnes and Noble reps stated they were comfortable with the $259 price for the reader, and didn't see that being adjusted for competitive reasons. They did announce their intention to be "competitive" on ebook pricing. Whether this means matchinbg Amazon's $9.99 standard price for many books was n ot explicitly stated.

They announced that they were working with publishers and exploring "bundling" options, where you could buy the paper and electronic versions of a book at the same time, though details of how thi9s would work were not offered.

They were asked about plans to support Windows Mobile and they stated that was planned. Since eReader is currently available in versions for the PocketPC 2002 and earlier, and Windows Mobile smartphones of 2003, it's unclear what support is being mentioned. They were also asked about an eReader app for Android, and while no specific announcement was made, they commented that the Nook was based on Android, so a reader app for other Android devices was a logical next step.

In response to queries about future devices akin to things like the Kindle DX, they stated they were looking at a variety of form factors, and geve the impression that the Nook was simple the first in what could become a line of readers optimized for different purposes.

They stated they have a mailing list of 20 million, and announcements would be made periodically of special events, free ebooks and the like. They also said they are workign with publishers for things like "author exclusive" offers available only fir the Nook.

A question about publication support got a response that Barnes and Noble didn't plan to use an RSS feed, but instead intended to convert publications purchased for viewing on the Nook to ePub. They also stated the Nook would not have a web browser, as they did not feel eInk supported a decent browsing experience.

It was a well received presentation with a couple of innovative features announced. Further information will be available at http://www.nook.com, and at http://www.barnesandnoble.com/twitter/.

Will this effort bear fruit? Can Barnes and Noble successfully compete across the board with online retailers like amazon, and brick and mortar stores like Walmart and Target? We won't know for a while, but Barnes and Noble seems to feel they have no alternative but to try. The development of BarnesandNoble.com, the purchase of Fictionwise, the partnerships with people like Plastic Logic and the release of a dedicated reader under their own brand are evidence of a determination to compete. We'll see whether they can.

I'm just wondering how long before people make remarks about the Barnes and Noble "nookie"...

Illegal Alien Halloween Costume

2009-10-17T08:18:00.001-07:00

LOS ANGELES (AP) — A Southern California immigrant rights group has asked Target stores to stop selling an ”illegal alien” Halloween costume it says is offensive to immigrants.

The costume, posted on Target’s web site, features the mask of an alien with a green card and an orange jumpsuit with ”illegal alien” written across the front.

Target spokesman Joshua Thomas says the company is removing the costume from the site after receiving several complaints.

He says the store never intended to sell the outfit but included it in its online offerings by mistake.

Angelica Salas, executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, says she wrote an e-mail to the Minneapolis-based retailer Friday calling the costume ”distasteful, mean-spirited, and ignorant of social stigmas and current debate on immigration reform.”

Mega Millions

2009-10-17T08:17:00.001-07:00

Mega Millions winning numbers for $200M lottery jackpot:-

The winning Mega Millions lottery numbers drawn tonight for the jackpot worth an estimated $200 million were: 10, 13, 18, 33 and 51 with the Mega Ball, 43.

The amount grew because no player matched all the winning numbers to win the $170 million grand prize Tuesday night. Although there was no grand prize winner, 10 tickets were worth second prizes of $250,000 each.

The largest payout so far has been a $390 million jackpot shared by a New Jersey couple from Cape May County and a truck driver in Georgia in 2007. In March, 10 co-workers from the information technology department of Chubb Insurance in White House station split a $140 million jackpot.

Mass Lottery

2009-10-17T08:15:00.000-07:00

The Sox, Pats, and C’s have all partnered with the Massachusetts State Lottery to offer team-themed scratch tickets and now the B’s want a piece of the action. According to Lottery Director Mark Cavanaugh, Mass. Lottery and the Boston Bruins are discussing the possibility of bring a $5 Bruins ticket to the market. Soon you could see the Spoked-B strewn across the floor on losing tickets at convenience stores and dive bars all across the Bay State

Sexuality Videos

2009-10-17T08:14:00.001-07:00

Sexuality and adult videocasts to liven up your sex life. These sex videocasts feature advice about sex and relationships, fantasy and role-playing, and sex education. Some of these adult videos are risqué and are suitable for those above 18 years of age, while some of them are suitable for teenage audiences. Settle in and remember the freedom of media with these sex videos.

OU-TX: Safe to Park?

2009-10-17T08:11:00.001-07:00

Not sure how many of you remember this, but there was quite the parking scam going on during the OU-TX game at Fair Park last year. The gist of the racket was shady people would put up a fake parking lot sign, and in some cases take money, for Oklahoma and Texas fans. During the game, they’d switch the sign to “No Parking” or something similar, then tow all the cars and want the owners to pay the fees. Pisses me off just thinking about it.

That company — Lone Star Auto Services — lost its license last November. How someone didn’t get 30 in the county clink is another good question, but I guess you have to take the wins where you can get them. To prevent others from pulling off the same money-stealing scheme this year, the City of Dallas has implemented some “safeguards.”

According to the Dallas Morning News, the “smart” people at city hall have decided that those wanting to sell parking spaces must purchase permits from the city. This affords you a special parking sign that you must display at the lot.

Properly permitted lots must display city-issued signs. The city recommends that fans use only permitted lots displaying the signs. On Saturday, when the Red River Rivalry game comes to Dallas, parking and transportation officials from City Hall will be spot checking the Fair Park lots to ensure they are properly attended and priced.

“The main reason they’re out there is to eliminate the issues we had during the Texas-OU game last year,” said Gary Titlow, project manager for the city’s transportation regulation department.

City Hall is also handing out a stern letter to towing companies that might think about pouncing on cars parked in private lots.

A stern letter, huh? What if they don’t oblige? A spanking? (SugarTits switches careers to tow-truck driver.) The story says that they have been testing the system at other events and have only spotted two evil tow-truck drivers trolling the lots for a quick buck. Still seems to be a really weak system, but it’s better than nothing I guess.

Gravy Train and I will actually be taking the new DART line that runs to that area of East Dallas. Jump on any Red, Blue or Green Line train that displays “Fair Park” and you’ll be taken to a land of college football glory and all the corn dogs you can consume. Also allows us to drink ourselves stupid and not worry about selling our flesh for rides home … again.

Programming Error Gives People 8 Times Correct Radiation over 18 Months

2009-10-14T22:34:00.000-07:00

In attempt to get better data, a hospital overrode default protocol on a CT scanner over a year ago. Now they've realized that they made a little mistake and have been giving people eight times the acceptable doses of radiation.

The issue only affected the scans of stroke patients so damage was limited to affecting about 200 individuals over the course of the 18 months during which the error in programming went unnoticed. While those patients are experiencing symptoms of radiation poisoning, such as hair loss, there's at least good news in that the FDA has finally issued alerts to hospitals to read the freakin' manuals before fiddling with their equipment.

And the Award for First Country to Establish Broadband as a Legal Right Goes To...

2009-10-14T19:21:00.001-07:00

Finland! Not only they have great universal health care—including dental—great public daycare, and great public education at all levels, but now they also got broadband as a legal right provided to every citizen. And not any crappy broadband.

The policy will be active in July 2010, when every Finn will get a one-megabit connection. But that's just an intermediate step towards their final goal: By 2015, everyone will have a 100Mbps—yes, a hundred megabits per second—available.

Now, before the political debate starts in the comments, please watch this.

Dental Training Mannequins, Or Venom During His Teenage Years

2009-10-14T19:20:00.001-07:00

We can't come up with anything much more horrid than these dental training mannequins, complete with braces. As Adam commented, they look like a "teenage Venom." But don't worry, we're sure that braces were adorable on you.

Family Guy Windows 7 Clip Does Not Have Me Rushing To Set My DVR

2009-10-14T19:19:00.001-07:00

Earlier this morning we heard that Family Guy is teaming up with Microsoft to promote Windows 7 on an upcoming show. If this clip is anything to go by, I wouldn't get your hopes up for comedy.

Again, Microsoft's sponsorship of the show means that it will air commercial-free. Let's hope the final version makes sitting through 30 minutes of this actually tolearable.

What's On Your Mind?

2009-10-14T19:18:00.001-07:00

What's on my mind? I would love to work at Facebook, in their new Palo Alto headquarters, that's what. They are located in a former laboratory, built in the 1960s. The interior looks just as pretty as the exterior:

gawkerGallery(5381525,12,'Facebook HQ');

It was revamped by Studio O+A, a San Francisco-based design firm. The employees have a gourmet cafe where they can order food at any time, and many of the walls are unfinished, so they can customize them in any way they want

Earning $1.30 Per Day From Adsense Is Enough To Lose Unemployment Benefits

2009-10-14T19:15:00.000-07:00

$1.30 barely gets vending machine soda, but it's enough to leave an NY lawyer without unemployment benefits. Her total Adsense earning of $238.75 was enough to trigger that response because there aren't proper guidelines in place for such residual earnings.

Karin (she asked Forbes to keep her last name private) was told everything from "you need to declare that you're working every time you update your blog" to something along the lines of "uhh...you shouldn't have lost your benefits over the Adsense income." In the end, none of the misinformation and hassle did much for her and she has taken Adsense off her blog as she struggles to regain her government check.

DNA-Inspired Closet Is As Space-Efficient As It's Twisted and Curvy

2009-10-14T18:26:00.001-07:00

Irina Alexandru's design is more of a coat hanger than a closet, but it's intended to allow for the maximum amount of clothing hangers in the smallest amount of space. I just plain like the curvy double helix design.

For those who are having flashbacks to biology class: Yes, a double-helix is actually nature's clever way of squeezing a heck of a lot of genetic information into a tiny coiled pattern. It's somehow almost fitting that the same design would make for efficient clothing storage, too.

Got Questions? Ask Jason

2009-10-13T21:36:00.001-07:00

You got questions? Questions that don't have to do with explaining when to use your flash or why cheap headphones are no good? I got answers.

Think of this as less about explaining technology and more about explaining what you should do with technology. Some examples:

• In what instances is it acceptable to wear a belt holster for your phone? (Prelim. answer: Only if you are handsome like Sean Fallon)
• How do I convince my wife/husband that we really need a 60+ inch television?
• My friend/taxi driver is texting while driving. What should I say, if anything, while I'm in the car?
• DVR or Hulu?
• How many seconds can a phone be in a toilet before it's considered a loss, even if it still works?
• Is it OK to hack my neighbor's Wi-Fi, even if they're kind of dicks?

Send all your questions to askjason@gizmodo.com. The more interesting it is, the more likely it is I'll answer it. And if you don't get your questions answered, try again—because Dear Abby doesn't know the difference between Boxee, Plex and XBMC.

Steve Jobs Is More Popular Than Oprah, Tony Hawk and The Olson Twins

2009-10-13T21:35:00.001-07:00

A survey conducted by Junior Achievement found that the majority of aspiring teenage entrepreneurs age 12-17 idolize Steve Jobs over such celebrity business supernovas as Oprah, Tony Hawk and the Olson twins because he 'made the world a better place'.

Yes, the world is a much better place now that many of us are hopelessly addicted to Apple products. I was going to say something about weeping for future generations, but it appears that the choices given to respondents didn't make a damn bit of sense either. Here's how the results broke down:

•Steve Jobs (35 percent)
•Oprah Winfrey (25 percent)
•Tony Hawk (16 percent)
•Mark Zuckerberg (10 percent)
•The Olsen twins (seven percent)
•Kimora Lee Simmons (four percent)

According to Junior Achievement, the list of entrepreneurs was chosen based on "people who had started business enterprises themselves, as opposed to licensing their names and images to products produced by someone else." While I agree that Jobs belongs on or near the top of any list of entrepreneurs, I can't help but wonder—where the hell is Bill Gates? You know...Microsoft...one of the biggest philanthropists of all time?

"What Sound Does Orange Make?" On Air with Michael Libbie

2009-10-13T21:34:00.001-07:00

I'm excited to be appearing as a guest today on Michael Libbie's show, Insight on Business. We'll probably be talking about a few things that are making the news in the business and business blogging worlds.

Some of the things I hope we get to talk about:

The bit how 54% of companies have banned the use of social networking while on the job.
When and why your company (maybe) shouldn't blog at all.
Should your company hire a Social Media Expert Escort Service Evangelist
21st Century Marketing: It's not about the tools
What sound does orange make?

That last one will come up, and it's an important question. The response may be even more important. Stay tuned.

The Ecohime Cellphone Strap Applauds Your Bowel Movements

2009-10-13T21:30:00.001-07:00

You went potty all by yourself! Feel the same sense of achievement you did as a child with the Ecohime cellphone strap while simultaneously concealing any unpleasant noises.

Actually, the sound emitted by Ecohime is supposed to be running water, but as our leader Jason Chen pointed out "it sounds like a standing ovation." Hopefully, version 2.0 will embrace this theme with raucous applause and words of encouragement and praise. "I knew you had it in you!", "Way to be #2!" and so on.

Prevent Imposter Lovers With The Fingerprint Ring

2009-10-13T21:28:00.000-07:00

Are you paranoid that your lover uses a lookalike stunt double on occasion? That her twin sister shows up instead of her? With the fingerprint ring, you can just compare fingerprints and know when it's the real thing.

All you do is get a kit, imprint your lover's (or even your own) fingers, send it off, and get a custom fingerprint ring in your choice of metals. The message the maker of these trinkets wants to send is that "your lover touching you, holding your finger, always with you," but all I'm hearing is "make sure it's not her sister...make sure it's not her sister!"

Vauni Cupola Fireplace Mounts Like, But Is Classier Than, a Flat-Screen TV

2009-10-13T21:27:00.001-07:00

Vauni's bioethanol ventless fireplace, the Cupola, may not have the warmth or coziness of a traditional wood-burner, but it does have practicality and cold Scandinavian style. Plus, the thing mounts right on your wall.

Made of aluminum for weight reasons and coming in white or black, the fireplace burns bioethanol fuel instead of wood, so it's maybe not as organic as lighting wood on fire but it is adjustable and easy to light. Vauni claims the fireplace is "as easily installed as a flat-screen TV," and will give you something classier to gaze at, open-mouthed, than the new season of The Hills. Prices start at 1840 Euros, which is about $2730 USD. Expensive, sure, but you must have expected that from a wall-mountable Swedish fireplace

Skype Might Buy Gizmo5 To Power Its VoIP Calling

2009-10-13T21:25:00.000-07:00

Skype might have been sloughed off of eBay into its own entity, but lawsuits, regarding its core Skype to Skype technology, might put them in trouble unless it has a backup plan of new VoIP tech.

TechCrunch is saying that Skype is looking to buy Gizmo5, a SIP-based service that isn't quite as popular as the former, but works pretty well. SIP is an open standard that works with many, many devices—Gizmo 5 works with Google Voice even—so this could be a pretty good move even if Skype gets out of legal trouble. Imagine piping your free Google Voice number through Skype to get free calls like you can now with Gizmo5.

UNICEF's Toy Soldiers To Help Real Kids

2009-10-08T18:50:00.001-07:00

UNICEF's direct mail campaign has put a teary smile on my face. They're sending out baggies of what appear to be lil' plastic toy soldiers, but are actually playing children, reminders of young'ns forced into battle in Africa.

This direct mail campaign is incredibly effective in how it brings forth childhood memories for many while emphasizing the reality of those who may never have one: Child soldiers in places such as Africa. The campaign may be aiming to find corporate sponsorships, but they've earned a check from me, too. [Direct Daily]